As it turns out

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What’s in a picture?

In Media and Entertainment, Reflection on March 26, 2012 at 12:34 PM

I’ve wondered this since attending a recording of the new Working Dog project, Pictures of You. Set to appear soon on our television screens, it is a novel talk show that takes its celebrity guests through their formative years, using their own photographs as prompts.

It is an interesting device – a Rorschach test for the way we perceive our past and the people in our lives. We can after all be oblivious to the significance of the moment. It is only when we get some distance that we are able to properly sift through and isolate what is truly precious. Sometimes it emerges from the most innocuous, badly composed, under-lit photo.

I was struck by this as the host, Brian Nankervis, presented a parade of images, each of which drew out hilarious tales and revealing anecdotes from his guests. The point of the show, of course, is to entertain. But in the process, it humanises individuals whom we know only as the characters they play, or the personas cultivated for them by the media.

There is something incredibly affecting, for instance, when the genial comedian, Frank Woodley, has to pause in the midst of telling a story about his late father, in order to compose himself. The studio audience recognised immediately that they had stepped onto hollow ground. They waited, silent.

This response to an otherwise unremarkable image of a tall man looking off-camera invites the idea that a photograph is more than the sum of its contents. We can talk about who is in it, where and when it was taken, and by whom. But something in the way we respond to certain images tells us that it transcends these elements.

So what’s in a picture? Perhaps it might be better to first ask: what is a picture?

A picture, a photograph, is a key. It unlocks parts of our selves. It opens the door to our stories. Where it features a human face, it invites connection.

Digitisation has lent itself well to such connections, reducing the world to the short radius around our desk. The impact can be potentially devastating. It is hard to look away when you’re looking at a face similar to your own, the face of another human.

It is no wonder that social campaigns and art initiatives increasingly use user-submitted pictures to highlight issues.

Project Unbreakable, for instance, invites survivors of sexual abuse to send a photo of themselves holding a poster of the words that their abuser had said to them. The intent is to provide survivors an opportunity to overcome the power of such words. However, the resulting compilation of photos not only empowers individuals, it re-humanises an issue that is often taboo or undeservedly confined to feminist discussion or matters of law. The portraits remind that there are real people, real bodies behind the statistics.

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This is *not* complicated

In Reflection on February 13, 2012 at 3:34 PM

Today is the fourth anniversary of the Parliamentary Apology to the Stolen Generations, delivered by then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

I wanted to mark it – just sitting at my desk in the study – by playing Archie Roach’s Took the Children Away.

It is an autobiographical song about his own removal from Framlingham station. It was the song that woke me to this chapter in history, soon after arriving in Australia.

I put on the song. It was going to be a moment of simple, quiet reflection, to remember and to give respect, even if no one saw.

It didn’t last long. My mind unexpectedly flashed to an image of my little son. I imagined him being taken away, for no more reason than that he is half-white (which he is, though not Aboriginal).

In a heartbeat, I turned into a mess. Ridiculous, noisy sobs took over as the music played on. My child is four years old, at the age which many Aboriginal children were removed from their families, to be institutionalised and adopted out, forever caught in the chasm between white man’s ways and their black identity and heritage.

I imagined not being allowed to visit my son, not seeing him again. I understood with new meaning why many women died of heartbreak during the time of the Aboriginal Protection Boards.

We sometimes make excuses for the sins of the past, explaining that race-based transgressions were a feature of the time, that people then did not know better or were misguided. But this speaks merely of a failure to imagine, an incapacity to put oneself in another’s shoes. Could anyone really argue that black mothers of the time felt about their children differently than white mothers then, or even today? How would we feel if it were our own children, our own powerlessness?

I find many things turn out to be complicated. But this is not one of them. Forcibly removing children from families without requiring authorities to establish neglect or mistreatment is an injustice. But it is not one that sits in the past, as some might like to believe. It remains in vivid, living memory for many who walk among us. It manifests in the continued fragmentation, within families, between individuals and their culture, between Indigenous and non Indigenous.

The Apology was never about gluing together these fragments; it was about acknowledging what was broken. It wasn’t about feeling guilty; it was about being sad together. Sometimes, we just need to be sad – together. And as in any relationship, it is not for those who’ve done wrong to say when to move on. It is for them to sit beside, and be still.

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Women are more than their vaginas

In Reflection, Women on January 11, 2012 at 10:52 AM

I don’t know how to put this delicately, so I’ll just straight out say it. I have a vagina.

I don’t feel one way or the other about it. It’s just something I was born with, like the colour of my skin (brown). But the longer I get immersed on Twitter, and the more I listen to women argue with men and with each other in newspapers and elsewhere (especially about what a ‘real’ feminist is), the more I feel as if I’ve somehow let down my vagina by not being angry enough, or angry in the right way, about anything to do with having one — sexism, patriarchy, raunch culture, pornification. It’s like I missed the passwords to get into the clubhouse.

I don’t deny that these things are real issues; I despise them in varying measure and for complex reasons. I don’t deny that certain injustices are based on gender, that many social and cultural structures inherently disadvantage women. I have no quarrel with the truth of these. But I do wonder about the limitations of framing unjust attitudes and practices from a singularly female perspective.

For one thing, it often has the effect of excluding men and fortifying adversarial positions. This is patently unconstructive, given that all of us have a role to play in ensuring that equity becomes the norm. Men need to own the serious imbalances, too.

There is a useful analogy in the American civil rights movement. People forget that many whites were involved in pushing for equal rights for African-Americans. James Zwerg, for example, was beaten during the 1961 Freedom Ride. The mob in Alabama did not distinguish him from his dark-skinned colleagues, and in one sense rightly so. The Freedom Rides helped to elevate the issue of colour to a higher truth about shared humanity — an idea that posed a monumental threat to the status quo.

This is not to say that whites were instrumental in the success of the civil rights movement. The point is that social problems rooted in prejudice cannot be solved by a mirror prejudice against members of the dominant group. It does not persuade them to change. Accommodating them in the struggle, does. This is the radical thing to do, if one must be radical. It is certainly a demanding and sensitive task to turn your oppressor into a partner. But it is one that I think has more merit than maintaining conflict.

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