Who Do You Think You Are?
by Raffaella Huizinga ︎︎︎9 March 2022
I said who do you think you are
Oh, oh (do you think you are, I said)
Ooh some kind of superstar (oh, oh, oh)
You have got to swing it, shake it, move it, make it
Who do you think you are
Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it
Show me how good you are
Swing it, shake it, move it, make it
Who do you think you are
Trust it, use it, prove it, groove it
Show how good you are
Spice Girls 1997
As a former photographer, I think about the complexity of photography.
My photographic archive (2009 – 2018) is made of photographing 'the other'.
Individuals and/or groups of people who have to deal with exclusion, oppression and who are poorly represented. Typical subjects such as drag queens, circus performers, nudists went through my lens. Unconscious of the extent to which my sociocultural viewpoint was impacted by deeply embedded colonial ways of thinking and doing, I endorsed and reinforced negative cultural stereotypes and stigmas.
In proud cooperation with Sarmad and as part of the Reviewing the Archive* project, I revisit my old photographic work and examine my processes of image making. As I go through my archive, analysing and reflecting, I think about the position of the white western photographer, about the unequal power dynamics, the repetition of images, and ‘The Other’.
* Reviewing the Archive is a three-part series of essays in which I look back at my work and image-making methods as a photographer.
Reviewing the Archive
Who do you think you
are?
A “Hell Hole,” Donald Trump called Brussels in 2016, between the Paris and Brussels attacks. All eyes were on Molenbeek, a sub-municipality of Brussels and home to a number of attackers. After the terrorist attacks in Brussels on March 22, 2016, there was a lot of negative image about this neighborhood and around Islam. I thought it was necessary that there should be a positive sound from the neighborhood. Motive? Creating a positive image, the everyday. Why? As a contrary to the negatively stereotyped media coverage of both Molenbeek and Islam. What did I have to do with all this? Nothing at all.
A year after the attacks, I stayed in Molenbeek for ten days to make a photo series about how the inhabitants of this district were doing. My approach was simple. I would address people on the streets, take their portrait then quiz them about their lives there. I specifically chose locations which could give substance to the positive image I wanted to create; parks, reintegration organisations, social cafes and colourful local shops. I strolled around interesting spots waiting to capture a passersby who fitted my pre-invented image of a happy and diverse community. I basically built my own version of Disney’s 'It's A small World' attraction.
I sold the photo series to Dutch newspaper Trouw. Trouw used the pictures alongside a feature by Marijke de Vries, a Dutch journalist living in Molenbeek at the time. My smiling portraits sat incongruously beside her sombre account of how the citizens of Molenbeek actually felt: abandoned.
The series was also published in the Brussels city newspaper Bruzz, in a special edition. I asked writer Sytske van Koeveringe to write a text about Molenbeek to accompany the images. A piece that matched the approach of the photos, namely a positive image, something that would contrast with the negative image and narrative in the media.
She didn't want to show the Molenbeek of the decay, the vacancy, the loitering youth and the waste on the street. During the week she spent there, she was especially struck by the people who readily received the stamp 'Molenbeek', while they were just living their lives, like everyone else.
(Van Koeveringen, Bruxelles - Edition 1563, 2017).
Mohamed el Bachiri, who had lost his wife in the Brussels bombing on 22 March 2016, was the guest editor on the Bruzz special edition. His eloquent plea for love and unity in a television interview shortly after the attack, where he calls on the viewer to connect with each other instead of hating each other, resonated with many viewers. His best-selling book A Jihad for Love, gives a moving account of the prejudices the inhabitants of Molenbeek suffer every day.
There are real social problems in Molenbeek. It’s a district with a large Moroccan population and unemployment is high. But the Molenbeek of the media is more frightening than the community I know. (Bachiri & Van Reybrouck, 2017)
Mohamed wrote the following next to my images in Bruzz1: “It’s sad we still have to make such reports. But at the same time it’s necessary. It’s only by knowing the other that we can understand and transcend the differences.” I don't know if Mohamed meant the word ‘sad’ in the way I interpret it now. In hindsight, it’s sad that I had had tried to create an image that I had in my mind beforehand, namely, to show the people of Molenbeek in a positive light. I, a privileged white woman, who arbitrarily stops and photographs passers by in order to create an invented story, sell it, and contribute something to a 'nuanced world’. In other words, a White Saviour. Why did I create this photo series about Molenbeek? Who did I create the series for? What does a privileged western white woman know about exclusion? Why is my position seldom questioned? Why is my appearance taken for granted?
Can I take photos of a group I don’t belong to?
Position - My
participation in Whiteness
Our right or privilege to move freely within society depends on various factors, including race, socio-economic class, gender, physical and mental abilities and sexual identity. Although discussions about privilege often centre around defecit, it is at least as important to consider how personal privilege maintains certain power structures.
Many residents of Molenbeek gave their smiles to me and my camera. My French is pretty abysmal so I used hand gestures to get people to pose as I wanted. The habituation of the camera, which has been inextricably linked to growing up from childhood and which we regard as familiar, means that people are quick to pose. Photography is seen to have a more accurate relationship with visible reality than the other arts, such as painting, and, as a result, can be viewed as inoffensive or innocent. But a photograph is never wholly innocent. A photograph is a snapshot of a situation. Through timing and framing, parts of the moment are obscured or revealed. Which angle and which moment are chosen is up to the photographer, who has the 'power' to capture what he wants to show, and leave out what he does not. But this supposed innocence doesn’t just apply to the medium of photography.
The normality of my appearance also plays a major role in this. Our social system is such that as a white, Western, privileged woman, I am perceived as the norm, and as such, safe, reliable and natural. This is one of the effects of the legacy of colonialism. It may seem like innocence but it isn’t: it is a supposed innocence. If something or someone is assumed to be innocent, but they are not, extremely dangerous and hurtful situations may arise.
I truly believed that by offering an alternative way of seeing Molenbeek, I could do something good for the community. Instead, my innate sense of confidence that my photo series could affect change, and a lack of awareness of my own position, betrayed my background. Whiteness is seen as the norm in Western society and therefore becomes invisible. As a result, Western white people are unaware of their influence on Western society.
Gloria Wekker describes it very accurately in her book Witte Onschuld (White Innocence):
As if the colonial baggage of purity, immaculateness, of good quality, innocence, superiority (Van Dale 1992), which the term 'white' carries with it, could be thrown off or thought away by sheer willpower. (…) Part of white privilege is the preservation of the so-called invisibility, indescribability, normality and naturalization of whiteness. White is invisible and unnameable only in the eyes of many of those who occupy that position, not in the eyes of black people and migrants. (Wekker, 2017, p.245 - 246)
Wekker’s book made me think more about my motives and position as a White Western photographer. It is important that I take a good critical look at myself and my method of working - not as a victim, but as instigator. An instigator who, from a position of white privilege and to serve her own ends, sets out to tell a story while failing to take her own position into account. I went to Molenbeek to make a photo series, sell it to a newspaper and show the world I was doing something ‘good’.
It has become more clear to me that for a long time, my position was invisible to myself. Because my position has always been considered 'normal', I never had to question or defend it. As a white person, my position is not challenged, but is constantly confirmed.
Looking back to the photo series I made just for me with this newfound awareness of my own position, I realize how problematic it really is. It doesn’t mean that, as a white person, I think I can’t do anything any more, or at least nothing good. That’s too easy. It’s important to consider your position as a photographer, the responsibility you have for the image and the story that it tells. So how do you tell someone else's story with awareness of your own position and expectations?
The White Gaze
It seems to me that the position of Western photographers who photograph ‘The Other’ is rarely questioned. What would happen if, for example, Dana Lixenberg were to call out her own position, perhaps to talk about what it meant to be a white presence when she was making the portraits in Watts, Los Angeles for her Imperial Courts (1993-2015) project. In this series Lixenberg photographed residents from communities against which there were serious prejudices. She wanted to counterbalance the one-sided media portrayal of South Central Los Angeles, especially during and after the 1992 Rodney King riots.
Or take Jimmy Nelson's (2013) Before They Pass Away coffee table book. Nelson travelled around the world photographing the world's last surviving indigenous tribes so we could enjoy them from the comfort of our sofa’s. The photographs reflect a colonial, destructive vision of indigenous peoples that the communities themselves can never identify with. Brazilian Yanomami spiritual leader Davi Kopenawa, says about Nelson’s portraits: “This man only wants to impose his own ideas on the photos, publish them in books and show them to everyone so that people find him a great photographer.”
In fact, Nelson and I have a lot in common, we close our eyes to what is really happening and forget about our own position. With our white butts, we’re unlikely to uncover what’s really going on anyway. We turn everything into a Western fairy tale and then appropriate it. Are these people waiting for a white anthropologist to turn up and start photographing them as ‘others’? What if Lixenberg and Nelson were open and transparent about their motivations and positions? What if they did it in such a way that the viewer was also made aware of theirs? Are the participants aware that they are contributing to a Western representation of themselves? This responsibility should never be left to the participant. The photographer is and remains the initiator, and, as such, has a duty to ensure awareness and be conscious of their position.
Research into a
(im)possible way
In 2021 I went back to Molenbeek a few times to reflect on the photos I’d made there in 2017. I was looking for a way to rectify the power imbalance between me operating the camera and the subjects who found themselves in front of it. This time, I turn the roles around and put the residents of Molenbeek behind the camera and got them to pose me in front of it. Where the language barrier allowed, I also asked them to add captions to the photos they made. I remained conscious of the fact that I was still the initiator, the one who would keep the images - and also the power.
I was hoping for images that would convey more about the residents than about myself, as the 2017 photo series had done. But the resulting photos were all rather flippant in tone, with the residents showing me posed among the stuff they were selling, or just filling up space. In retrospect, I realised that I’d placed the residents in a much more peculiar position and that it was inevitable my attempt would fail. It turned out to be a good way of getting past the paralysing sense of guilt and choosing a different course of action. Once again, the supposed innocence, or absence of it, resulted in a lack of perspective and engagement. My pictures revealed nothing about the residents of Molenbeek.
During one visit, I came across the photo documentary, ‘Puissance Molenbeek’, (Molenbeek Power) part of the #Imagine1080 youth project organised by Molenbeek’s House of Cultures and Social Cohesion (Maison des Cultures et de la Cohésion Sociale). Initiated by founder Zakaria El Bakkali and photographer Johanna de Tessieres, the project offered young Molenbeekers an opportunity to express themselves directly through film and photography. Speaking about the project, Zakaria and Johanna told me how the young people are well aware of the prejudices that stigmatise their neighbourhood. During the workshop they’d come up with the idea of using photography to illuminate the large group of women in Molenbeek who participate in sport (some of whom attended the photography workshop themselves). Intense collaboration between the project participants and the organisers produced a fascinating series of photos that reflect the inclusive diversity of the neighbourhood and resulted in the exhibition ‘Puissance Molenbeek’.
The point here is not just the cooperation or an exhibition, but about something much bigger, namely representation. The youngsters are able to identify with the images, be proud that they are part of them, and to inspire others what they believe is possible for them. Zakaria and Johanna invested a lot of time in talking to the young people and their families about what a photo can trigger, what it means to have a photo on display. They also worked with young people during the selection process.
‘Puissance Molenbeek’ is a beautiful project in which respect for the needs of the Molenbeek youngsters, awareness of position and representation can clearly be seen. Rather than being about the photographers, it’s about the stories the images are telling and what that can lead to. In this case, a representation that transcends prejudices.
But, that’s not what I
meant.
Anousha Nzume -
Hallo Witte Mensen (Hello White People)
Mohamed's comment on my photo series in Bruzz magazine motivated me to keep reflecting on the series.
‘It’s sad that we have to make such reports today’.
It made me think about my motive for making my series, and about my position as a white Western photographer. The work says a lot about my ideals, my vanity and my history. I was only interested in my own story. I responded to my own impulsive urge to help instead of first listening to what people really want. But then again, are the people actually waiting for this?
Whiteness remains a difficult subject. I believe it is deeply rooted in the Dutch social system. Many people, myself included, are unaware of this structural problem. I must keep reminding myself to be conscious of the complexity of whiteness, of the dominance of white self-representation (in photography and image) and of the persistence of the white norm. At the same time, I must be careful not to detach myself and assume that because I am aware of my position and privileges I am no longer part of the whiteness problem.
It’s problematic that I went to a so called “troubled neighborhood” in the belief that I could solve their representation problem, blissfully ignorant of the colonial baggage and white privilege that I carry. In my eagerness to dispel prejudices about Molenbeek and Muslims, I photographed the residents as ‘The Other’, and was not open to what was really going on.
I notice how recently I’ve been looking for a way to ethically photograph ‘The Other’ in a community. But perhaps the conclusion is simply that it should stop. There are plenty of photographers, imager makers, writers, artists, etc., who can identify with the group that the work is about. The world does not need white saviors.
You can be aware of your privileged position, power, and all the complexity that comes with it, but does that really transcend what it should actually be about?
There are some good examples of how this complexity is shown, but often they are arrived at through discomforts and missteps*. To gain new insights, it is important to think about alternative forms and to learn from ones’ mistakes, and not, as I did, fall back into old patterns.
Zakaria and Johanna show a beautiful and committed project with and about the youth of Molenbeek, and through intensive collaboration create a photo series from the inside that shows a genuinely positive image. Something I would have liked to have done, but unconscious of my deeply rooted colonial ways of thinking and doing, could never have achieved.
The bumpy road that is whiteness demands a lot of effort and reflection.
As Mohamed writes in ‘A Jihad for Love’: “The future? It starts with history.”
Translated by Judy Ellington and Britt Kroon
1. El Bachiri, BRUZZ - Edition 1563, 2017
Bachiri, M. E., & Van Reybrouck, D. A Jihad of Love (2017). De Bezige Bij.
de Vries, M. (2017, March 22). Een jaar na “Brussel” voelt Molenbeek zich in de steek gelaten. Trouw. https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/een-jaar-na-brussel-voelt-molenbeek-zich-in-de-steek-gelaten~baac3c0f/
Van Koeveringen, S. - edition 1563. (2017, 22 maart). BRUZZ. https://issuu.com/bruzz.be/docs/binder_bruzz_1563
Wekker, G. (2020). Witte onschuld: paradoxen van kolonialisme en ras (01 ed.). AUP Algemeen.
Nzume, A. (2017). Hallo witte mensen (Dutch Edition) (01 ed.). Amsterdam University Press.
* Bieke Depoorter – Agata
Depoorter, B. (2022). Agata. Bieke
Jan Hoek – My Masai
Hoek, J. (2017). Jan Hoek - My Maasai, The Maasai Photographed By Eastern African photographers (1ste editie). APE.