Some thoughts on photography, and its connections to social conditions and tort law.

Tort law springs from the Industrial Revolution: factory work, and the unsafe conditions that drove techno-industrialist “progress.” Faster & cheaper meant (means) risking lives. What an arm or leg is “worth” can change whether it is in the interest of profit to improve working conditions. "Worth" changes with the race of the injured body.

This set of social conditions fed photographers like Riis. His images simultaneously represent generalized spectacle and focused humanitarian agenda. The flashbulb that made his work possible was a way of making the Hollywood “fill” portable, bringing it to dark hallways with no electric light at all. There is then a fake-ness to these photos, even the most genuine photos may have been “staged” with a flash.

We are faced with a twofold photographic dilemma. If we valorize the subject, we risk doing so only conditionally (A Few Good Men), or producing a justification for doing nothing. If we show the pathos & wretched conditions of the subject, we risk sensationalizing the subject and reinforcing stereotypes. And either representation requires the Hollywood “three-point system.”

Camera technology lends its light most unproblematically to the middle-class subject (as it was designed to do) and the banal situations of family portraits, vacation photos (themselves covertly disturbing creations, sun-shining pictures of resort hotels in countries where the average citizen is below the poverty line) &c. Is it perhaps not enough to simply shine the halo-effect on the black actor? It seems like we must completely reappropriate photography itself if we are going to use it “against race.”