REGARDING OTHERNESS AMONGST US

By Immaculata Abba

Earlier this month, I went to see the ‘Another Kind of Life: Photography at the Margins’ exhibition at the Barbican thrice. I intended to do so because I am obsessed with marginality: this quality of being, or regarded as being, outside the mainstream or centres of power. I am interested in alienation and resultant loneliness, in how the margins are brimming with creativity (because outsiders only have the option of creating another centre for themselves), and in the oppression, present in marginality more often than not, that makes marginal people marginalised. With these interests at heart, I went to the exhibition curated by Alona Pardo because it looked like an exposition on another way of regarding marginality and otherness. I was going to add it to my repertoire of tools on how to see, think about and engage with otherness.



It did not fail me. I went the first time on my own, then the other two times on exhibition tours, one of which was provided by the curator herself. I learnt about the eunuch community in India, about Soviet hippies who had to hide as undercover archaeologists in the 60s, about some notorious groups that helped define youth culture in America, France, and the UK. I also saw a lot about homelessness and marginalised sexual identities. This is not all that there was to the exhibition, there were about 20 featured bodies of work from Japan, US, Russia, UK, Chile, India and Nigeria over the past 60 years. However, as varied as the features were, the further I went into the exhibition, the more I felt the growing of a knot in my mind. I had two main questions: 1. What was the rationale for this selection? (In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Pardo had stated that this was not a curated definition of otherness. That makes sense because otherness exists on an infinite spectrum. So I guess it was random, like the start of a conversation…) 2. So why does something feel off? The rest of this article will see me do my best to answer my question.

Around the same time I went to see this exhibition, I was reading Alfredo Cramerotti’s book on aesthetic journalism in which he argued for artists to engage with their subjects more deeply and imaginatively, beyond obvious reporting. It was a call for artists to work as both knowledge producers and knowledge critics. In my own words, his necessities were: a plurality of perspectives, a passage of time to allow for idea development, and the artists’ addition of subjective yet critical meaning to the information they present.

Looking at this exhibition through the lens of what I understood from Cramerotti’s writing, I was able to deeply appreciate the sustained relationship a lot of the featured artists had with their subjects. My favourite example of this was Dayanita Singh’s profile of Mona Ahmed, an Indian eunuch. In the 28 years, they were friends (until Ahmed died in 2017), Ahmed came to see Singh as her best friend. Originally, Singh was commissioned by The Times and after profiling Ahmed, Ahmed retracted her consent and Singh lied to her editor that she had lost the film rolls to heat. They wrote a book together in 2001 on Ahmed’s life and it wasn’t until 2013 that Singh was able to remake a moving still of Ahmed that both of them felt really captured Mona Ahmed’s essence.

To bless the newborn child, I am dancing in front of the house. 1994. Dayanita Singh.

Then, there is the plurality of perspectives, a plurality that should be understood in terms of both number and kind. See from as many people’s perspectives, as well as from as many different angles. My favourite example was Jim Goldberg’s 6-year-long documentation of a group of homeless teenagers in San Francisco in the 90s. While working on the project, he often acted as caretaker for them. The display included photographs, a film, a book and objects. It also included accounts from some of their parents, notes from missed appointments with social workers, etc. A significant amount of objects and visuals on display had written comments from the children on them. He really wanted them to use their voices, even though at the end of the day the project was his telling of their story so that the project became more than just a report on homelessness. It allowed me see beyond what Jim Goldberg saw, and into how the children themselves felt. In one of the objects on display, one of the girls, Echo, writes:

“Kids, all kids are sick of people trying to change them. […] I have never known you to do that. You showed us as we were and let us tell the story ourselves. Show people that they are not the only ones that matter, and that they do not have the right to classify kids into neat boxes, because that will not make them go away.”

USA. Hollywood, California. 1991. Runaway from Florida who stole her Daddy's credit card. 14-year-old girl who says she is pregnant with triplets. Jim Goldberg.

See, Jim Goldberg was not trying to do that thing of ‘I have to tell stories objectively.’ Because who will that serve? Often when people, artists, writers and journalists alike, talk about telling stories ‘objectively’, they mean telling the stories without any emotional texture, telling the story so that even God in heaven does not feel moved. But who does that serve? Since journalism (and so this applies to the journalistic kind of art) is about holding power to account, knowing the truth about injustice and choosing to be silent or ‘neutral’ about it in the name of ‘facts speak for themselves’ protects abusive powers. Facts don’t speak for themselves, they speak for the narrative. Your narrative either suggests there is nothing to be worried about and there is no one responsible, or it does the opposite. I thought to myself: Be like Jim Goldberg, don’t just stop at presenting plural perspectives. Be imaginative in the way you frame your story and your subjects so that your audience is moved to act against abusive and oppressive powers keeping marginal people marginalised.

Yet, as impressed as I was with most of the bodies of work, something was still off and it had to do with the exhibition itself. If we understand curation as an art in itself, we can see how this exhibition ticks the boxes of sustained engagement with the subject matter over a long period of time and across different angles and perspectives. However, the meaning it offered left some to be desired. My first itch came in the first artist’s cubicle: Diane Arbus. (The bodies of work were organised into cubicles to spatially represent the feeling of outsider-insiderness. Cool right?) Didn’t Susan Sontag give reasons I had agreed with on why Diane Arbus’s work is problematic in the way it regarded otherness?

A young waitress at a nudist camp, N.J., 1963. Diane Arbus.

During both tours I went for, both women talked about how they were responding to Sontag’s critique because, at the end of the day, insiders on either side of the margin do not have the monopoly over the telling of their stories as long as whoever is telling the story is informed and nonexploitative. I think that is true. The subjects in Diane Arbus’s photos consent to her photography and are often clearly posed comfortably for her as if she had earned their trust and vulnerability. But I don’t think that was the fulcrum of Sontag’s criticism. Consent, being informed and not being exploitative is not all that there is to a photograph. I think I was uncomfortable with the way the exhibition insisted on difference, on otherness, as if it was a single authority on what is ‘normal’ and so what is not. As much as the curator insisted that the exhibition is not an attempt to define the outsider, it inevitably takes sides with a particular ‘centre’, with a particular mode of convention that regards the identities and lifestyles on display as marginal. I hated that at the back of my mind, the whole time was the word ‘freak-show’ and I want to see people not as abnormal, but as possessing just another shade of difference. This is the paradox of the exhibition, that in its efforts to celebrate difference, it insists and reinforces this difference at the risk of essentialising the ‘other’, a risk it did not always overcome. I’m adding this exhibition to my repertoire of tools, as an example of a body of work that takes its perspective of centre and other for granted as the universal one and so does not quite face these two questions in the issue of marginality:

Who gets to define where a centre is and where the margins start?
How much do those exhibited as ‘others’ benefit from such an exhibition of ‘otherness’ where the subject of attraction is their otherness and not their humanity?

Is it possible to celebrate difference without falling into this trap? Maybe by exhibiting something else and showing that a variety of people who have taken part. For example: An exhibition on the abusive relationship citizens have with the state and it could include a lot of the groups profiled in this exhibition who were marginalised by their country’s laws for their sexual identities, along with more popular and mainstream figures who have also suffered abuse from the state like Edward Snowden and Angela Davis. Another example, an exhibition on storytellers’ relationships with their subjects which would include Dayanita Singh’s relationship with Mona Ahmed, along with Beyoncé and the Black South. In both examples, difference is celebrated, while their humanity is foregrounded.

Go see it yourself and let me know your thoughts. Leave a comment or write me an email: immaculata.na@gmail.com.