MORALITY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

A few years ago I asked myself a simple question: ‘what one single word described truthfully to me who I was.

The first word which popped up was ‘photographer’. As much of my life has been centred around making pictures with cameras, including moving pictures, it seemed sensible, definitely descriptive, holistic, complete but then I hesitated. It occurred to me that I was being intellectually or perhaps emotionally vague. It seemed too easy.

I have been and still am a photographer, but perhaps this meant that what I am is not who I am. Immediately I recognised that if I became more difficult with myself I could ask more serious questions as: ‘why am I compelled to photograph?’ For instance I am totally disinterested in fashion, car, beauty photography. Those disinterests may indicate that it is not the medium itself that draws me, but why I had devoted the first part of my professional career documenting the nature, conditions and activities of the British working class and the lives of black people in England, mostly in Brixton and why I have continued to make films and exhibitions about democracy, refugees, exile, the struggles in Bosnia and Ukraine, and so on.

What I knew was that I despise bullies whatever their motivation or causes and in particular when the bullies are politicians, bureaucrats or representatives of the state or of corporations. Why? Probably because I grew up in the shadow of an older brute bully of a brother. Not only did I have to suffer his pinches, scratches and blows for all my childhood but also the accusations from him via my father that I was always at fault for whatever ruckus he would cause.

Perhaps theories about the dialectical nature of personalities are correct – that out of the condition I lived within the opposite developed within me. Love, beauty, honesty, bravery, kindness all seemed attractive and brought hope and light to my imagination. I thought of the things I had photographed, of my political tribulations in high school and university; of my self-exile from the US; of the fights I had with editors over their use of my pictures to mis-represent the people I photographed. I recognised that always I wanted and still want to do what I think is right.

What does that mean? In an always non-religious mindset I recognised that I am a Moralist, guided not by profit margins, bottom lines, reputation making, etc. but rather by what is egalitarian, supportive of peace, negative freedoms* and justice.

OMG, Mr Goody-Goody! Well no. Rather someone who recognises that as a species we are deeply flawed. We can witness this in that we allow a small group of billionaires and totalitarians lead us into hell. I want my granddaughters to live in a bountiful world of beauty, in peace, in a culturally rich creative community, and I want the same for your grandchildren.

Many of us understand that the once secure middle classes have been continually assaulted, slowly impoverished, and had our civil rights diminished by a thousand incisions administered by the neoliberals, by the neo-fascists, and by Maga, Orange, Putin, Orban and Farage groups of greed stricken, power hungry, emotionally dead mostly old men and their Ai Silicon tech bros who are taking over our lives not only with the financial squeeze but now with Ai. They are increasing the assault on our freedoms via capturing huge amounts of what was once our private identity into data bundles to circumscribe our thinking with highly sophisticated propaganda and censorship.

And how are these things discussed by the establishment’s press and politicians?They have a way to purge decency, to deny the existence of our historic values, to dismiss our financial problems as unimportant, to insist on altering in their favour the reality of any condition, to re-enforce the conformity of opinion while smearing the value of critical thinking, by almost invisibly invading our sense of privacy.

As they smother us within their censorship – they spawn an airless vacuity, buying some of us off by granting us a minimum authority and rewarding our loyalty with bobbles or fame. In this they smother all decent and therefore all meaningful art – the only cultural tool we have access to which offers a humane moving expression of opposition to their collapsing the human values emotionally, intellectually and politically we thrive upon.

You see, asking this simple question can take you on an emotional journey.

Over the last 40 years the neoliberals and now their tech bros are increasing the speed of change towards their tech nightmares while making it seem like it is the new normal and that somehow, as we lose evermore freedoms, self-awareness, and controls over life and what there is to believe in it will all be well for we the impoverished, the unemployed, the hopeless.

And our young people, left in an intellectual wasteland of uncritical half-truths and many distortions without continuity, without profound social observation, without questioning why we are here and what is life, fall back upon childish sci-fi other worlds filled with monsters and killer heroes. They are being seduced by the new tech they can play with, creating empty forms and poor stories, convinced that the hollow world they are tutored in is a good rewarding art-filled world, but which is in fact a place of empty dreams.

Alas…perhaps don’t ask what that one word is…

NOTES
*This idea of negative and therefore also positive FREEDOM was developed by the English philosopher Isiah Berlin. He defined positive freedom as a condition in which one may do anything they wish to do regardless of social and legal restraints, whereas negative freedom is to live in a society in which the state creates laws to protect the poorest and weakest members of society. Since I dislike bullies I prefer to live in a world in which the ill, weak and poor are protected and justly treated.