Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change

Cross-posting a friend's written work on picturing, and what it means to her, as well as I.

Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change

27 August 2009
FSC Forest Complex
Subic, Pampanga
2:15 a.m.

Since the dawn of civilization, storytelling has been used by man as a means to entertain, educate, instill moral values and record history in aid of cultural preservation. Stories were shared through song and dance, rudimentary drawings scratched into cave walls and even temporary media like sand, leaves and the trunks of living trees. Through technology, man learned to develop more permanent and portable forms of communicating stories by drawing or writing in cloth, textiles, glass, metal and paper. Innovations like the printing press and film photograph paved the way for communicating en masse. Information reached more people in shorter time.

In the advent of the digital age, the speed and ease by which knowledge is transmitted has grown tremendously. Now, stories have the ability to trespass all familial, geographic and cultural boundaries. A plague in an obscure and remote town in Central America, for example once reported by international news agencies, can send a group of Japanese scientists in a flurry to seek a cure for the disease. An amateur video coverage of an endangered species in Antartica being slaughtered by poachers uploaded through the internet may cause a worldwide outrage among concerned groups who would call for stricter policies and sanctions regarding the issue. On a more personal level, a feature story of a young man without any limbs but who manages to be mobile and teach high school in an effective manner can inspire thousands of people with even less debilitating disabilities to lead more proactive lives and be of use to their communities. Stories, when presented truthfully and effectively, especially on a large scale, do facilitate inner and outer change.

I am foremost a social development worker and social researcher by profession. My work with various local non-government organizations (NGOs) brings me to the field where large contentious issues play themselves out in a concrete level. So far my work has been fulfilling. This is the drill: International funder promises aid to a developing country through various NGOs. These local groups create social programs and projects proposals for the funder’s approval. The money is released and the NGOs implement the programs. Throughout this stage, NGO workers, me included, are exposed to the socio-economic, cultural and political challenges that the people in the communities face in the micro level. We are able to pit their stories against the wider landscape of governance and socio-economic, cultural and political trends and see possible points of intervention--whether to troubleshoot existing projects or policies or to create needed ones. We write volumes of reports that the funders need to determine whether to fund another series of projects or not. The cycle continues.

Notice that the glut information has a very limited audience. At best, reports are furnished to government agencies in order to help them do their jobs well. However, these information usually replete with gut-wrenching stories and proposed solutions are only read by the usual people—the NGOs and the funders themselves. It’s like preaching to the converted.

There has been little move to disseminate newfound learning in the field to the common people. This is unfortunate. Time and again, social development has emphasized the need for change to begin from the grassroots. But how can this when people themselves do not have a grasp their issues as part of a wider context? How can this be when they do not know that their issues are similar issues that affect other groups of people even from different locales as well? It is common knowledge that people are debilitated when they feel alone but are empowered when they band together because of shared problems, operative word: shared.

That information is taken from the common people but do not go back to them prevents an active and dynamic participation which can only be borne out of awareness. When the stakes are conveyed to them in a comprehensive and coherent manner, people don’t just wait for solutions to community problems. They are forced to come up with these instead. Only from a well-informed community can participatory and therefore more sustainable development be spurred. To illustrate, a mother who realizes that the stagnant water in her backyard is the kind that caused hundreds of deaths in a town far from her residence due to dengue fever, will clean up her yard and not wait any government program to address the potential problem. Perhaps, especially if she holds some power in her neighborhood, she will also engage others to a collective action that will ensure that no household in their area will tolerate the existence of stagnant water there.

In all this discussion, where does photography, particularly documentary photography factor in?

Knowledge and inspiration are ingredients for change. I doubt that the mother in the above example would have read the World Health Organization’s annual report. She may have read the story from a newspaper or heard it on the radio. The challenge to sow knowledge and inspiration, I believe, is to convert an amalgam of useful information into a popular medium that has the capacity for clear, coherent and concise storytelling. Documentary photography, aside from newspaper articles and radio sound bytes, is one powerful tool.

In various experiments conducted by scientists, it had been discovered that people learn more quickly and retain knowledge by the use of images. A simply truthful yet aesthetically arresting photo can provide knowledge and inspiration to more number of people than inches-thick of academic reading or radio talk show. A photo can move you, figuratively and literally. It is for this reason that I have been dabbling in various sorts of photography for a couple of years now. For me like writing, photography is a means to communicate and knowledge and inspiration. But unlike writing, a photo is universal in that even an unschooled person can instantly recognize truths within just four angles. With photos, there is no language barrier. And in a world where problems can be shared by various groups of people from different lands at digital pace, it is imperative to communicate through universally recognizable means—the photograph—at least initially, in order to facilitate the rapid and collective seeking out of solutions.

Photography is not just showing everybody how beautiful the world is, although it is also that. Photography, when used to tell stories, can make more known to the wider public the problems, victories, best practices, workable solutions and possible points of cooperation as viewed by different stakeholders in society. It is a means to impart knowledge and inspire. It is also an effective tool for change.

-DM