what does a camera do

Osucha’s distinction between the “honorific” and the “repressive” functions – “in the honorific function, the image's personal meaning seems to eclipse its social or public meaning” while in the “repressive...it is the personal that gets eclipsed” (11) – interests me. Since the honorific and repressive are described as two ways of deployment adopted by the photographic portraiture, it raises the question of how the photography technology, an objective instrument as one may understand it to be, can be used to achieve effects of entirely opposite direction. Dyer elucidates the fact that the movie lighting apparatus is developed to discriminate on the basis of race in effect. When it comes to the television producer’s difficulty with having too many lack audiences sitting in the front row, the question that should be asked here is not how to figure out a way of fitting black people to this lighting apparatus, but that why isn’t the lighting apparatus developed to work for both white and black people equally in the first place. But I also wonder, given a certain photo, how much of the honorific or repressive work is done by a discriminating technology, and how much of it is done by a dominant aesthetic preference – is it possible to really perceive a photo portraiture of Aunt Jamima as beautiful? If not, is it because of us or because of the way camera captures her? If yes, does it mean we are tacitly approving the work done by the discriminating camera? Or can we just avoid choosing between these two options by questioning the status of the camera as a neutral recorder and provider of truth? What can one do, when one faces a photographic racial representation?