WEEK 10 PHOTOGRAPH
FOLLOWED BY THE SHAME, A SHORT ESSAY ON NEOLIBERALISM'S ASSULT ON MORALITY, CULTURE AND THE ARTS
This woman at 30, possessed elegance.
Not the elegance of wealth but of dignity and grace.
Everyone who encountered her either knew or sensed this was so.
My camera records the light reflecting off the surface of people and things,
as does yours.
I can’t intercede any more than the rest of us can,
other than with lens qualities,
filters,
choice of diaphragm and shutter speed,
angles of view,
the lenses relationship to the subject and the light
(that three cornered dialogue)
but I do pre-visualise.
To pre-visualise is more than understanding
what the negative or raw file will technically provide.
I offer my presence, my knowledge, culture, memory, empathy
and the trainload of misapprehensions,
and all the sad vagaries of being human
to determine when and from what angel to release the shutter.
The pre-visualisation is not about the simple accounting of light
reflecting from surfaces,
but about what I sense is an inner meaning,
or truth and how I believe that inner meaning will best be revealed.
How composition,
how what is in the frame and what remains out of the frame,
how tones and their distribution,
how colours or monochrome,
how the relative sharpness or softness of forms
are revealing of the subject matter’s inner meaning or content.
I felt the tones,
I planned her way of sitting,
and knew on that batch of Polaroid film,
it would appear this way.
This is what pre-visualization is about:
seeing in your mind’s eye
what the picture will look like,
but more – what the picture may elicit as an emotional response
when printed and presented.
All of this process above is under assault from what follows.
THE SHAM
and the shame in the word/concept/imposition of Neoliberalism
on all of our lives.
It is not only that it has dismissed the already shattered ideas of sharing wealth
(as in the 17th century concept of the need to share the commonwealth)
but it has also infiltrated our belief systems,
our tolerance,
our morality
and our ever rarer fragments of kindness.
DRIBBLE-DOWN ECONOMICS
With the stagnant income and wages of the middle and working classes
since the 1970’s,
accompanied by rising prices,
rising taxes and rising interest rates,
more expensive but poorer education,
fewer support systems and practitioners,
fewer houses and flats and more expensive rents
and fewer opportunities for our young,
we face the day-by-day horror of insane wars, rising fascism
and the climate crisis,
numbly standing-by
witnessing ever greedier,
power-driven self-loving, weak ‘strongmen’
who ruin our world as they rule with ever more cruelty.
CULTURE AND MORALITY
This monster,
an amalgam of BIG MAC economic theories,
with pervasive surveillance of public spaces
and ever creeping restricted freedoms,
with narrowing fairness
and a society ever-more poisoned by our atmosphere,
with plastics showing up in new born’s hearts,
with between 60 and 80% of meals composed of ultra-processed foods,
leave the arts as one of the few remaining centres of resistance and rebellion ….
Neoliberal America and Orange
and to a large degree their poodle, the UK,
have eviscerated Western culture
with their globalization,
financialization
and bureaucratization of everything,
and consequently their suppression of meaningful culture
and their homogenization of culture and place.
Combine a godless and therefore an ethically aimless life[i]
with the popular culture’s continual emphasis on the benefits of individualism,
and add to this the difficulty for individuals to formulate
a personal and generous humane morality,
it becomes more understandable
why our world is crueller,
why people are increasingly aimless
and consequently why we are more self-indulgent of nihilistic.
If nihilism is about one thing, it is hopelessness[i].
Today, after these many years of Neoliberal policies
their gutting beauty and intelligence from our educations and traditions,
while swamping them with empty materialism
and an infantile but over sexalised popular culture,
they have constructed a mental/emotional landscape
without meaningful goals,
without inspiring heroes,
and without hope for a better, relevant and fulfilling life.
This crime of stealing from all of us,
but particularly stealing the dreams of the young,
is compounded by the extension of their morally shallow ideals
into the sphere of international politics.
They, with their media and popular culture,
have created an opaque hierarchy
so that little is clear to us
but provides the Establishment near total control
while projecting an outer appearance of openness.
[i] "Nihilism" comes from the Latin ‘nihil’, or nothing, which means not anything, that which does not exist. It appears in the verb "annihilate," meaning to bring to nothing, to destroy completely.
OPPOSITION
The attempt by an outsider to offer real stories, relevant stories, exposing stories
can always be dismissed as inadequate, one-sided,
judgemental, poorly researched, or of insufficient quality and so on.
This is how the cultural canon is constructed and maintained
and how it attempts to break the confidence
of the dissident writer, film-maker and producer.
These institutions have a hold on people
because they address our deepest needs and urges,
our fears and our wants through their stories and images.
Of this there is little doubt,
because without that connection to our psychological needs,
religion would not have meaning for us.
They wrap us in their fantasies and reduce us to dependence
while they calm our fears of death with their lure of a hereafter.
This seduction makes us dependent on their myths.
This is why the ruling elites, the politicians, the media are all a sham
and a shame on us that we cannot seem to see this and respond to it,
to object, to bombard our politicians with questions, suggestions,
endless letters of objections and why artists need to step up to their social responsibility of providing ideas, questions, kindness and beauty…in all of this craziness we need beauty to help is remember our humanity.
NOTES
phantastic text, great photographs
Lovely homage to T and a beautiful image