Photography & Post-Truth Politics

Process

“We all confront the parameters of our cage eventually. What we do when we reach those bars helps define us” ― C. Fausto Cabrerra¹

The first time I saw Hoda Afshar’s ‘Agonistes’ I could not escape her subject’s eyes. Their absence haunted me; reminding me of a story a friend had told me years ago about how her cousin used to cut the eyes out of all her Kurt Cobain posters to stop them following her around the room – the process of dehumanising his representation back into a two-dimensional object.

For ‘Agonistes’ the Iranian born, Melbourne based artist documented the experiences of nine Australian whistleblowers following their decision to speak out against the multiple injustices they had witnessed. Afshar articulates their stories through a multi-layered, multimedia portrait series that makes use of still and moving images. The stills are a series of black-and-white portraits featuring busts from the neck up; with the moving-image being in full-colour and seeing each sitter recount their tale, albeit with only a sliver of their body visible in each shot – an eye here, a mouth there. Those black-and-white images are the output of a multi-step process that initially saw each sitter’s likeness captured by 110 cameras simultaneously. Following this, the information is processed to create a 3D image which is subsequently printed and the resulting sculpture photographed.

Whilst this may seem like an elongated process for a portrait, it merely highlights the numerous states all images go through, prior to their presentation to their audience. Sometimes these types of processes are concealed, but, more often, they are simply not processed separately by the audience who has received them; instead they are wrapped up and masked in the visual language that underpins them. In ‘Agonistes’ these processes sit front and centre, with Afshar not only asking us to confront the medium but the relationship it has with power. These two objects, the still and the moving image, not only carry the story of their sitter’s experiences but also they also carry the story of cruelty and pain inflicted by the Australian state through the many tentacles of its system. They are like the casts of Pompeii’s bodies: they do not merely represent themselves, they represent the process they have gone through, the actions they undertook, the trauma suffered by both the body and the mind.

In Afshar’s series we also see a comment on the genre of documentary photography itself, and its quantitative and qualitative aspects. In the stills, we see the output of more than one hundred cameras, their lenses, their perspectives, the realities they shape. They combine together to present the document, the object – and yet the eyes are absent. The extremes of modern technology are incapable of capturing it all, incapable of capturing the ocular viewpoint of the subject, incapable of articulating their perspective. Instead this is presented separately, in the moving image. Their words, their voice, their personal story, their truth remains separate from the document that captured their likeness with mathematical precision.

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Politics

“People in this country have had enough of experts” ― Michael Gove²

In 2016, Oxford Dictionary named ‘post-truth’ as their word of the year, noting its prominence in relation to post-truth politics following that year’s presidential election in America and the Brexit referendum in the UK.³ While not a new concept – its impact on society and politics have been discussed by many theorists since being raised by Nietzsche in his 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’⁴ – recent years have seen this discussion move out of theoretical frameworks and into mainstream consciousness, as the idea that we are living in a post-truth society, particularly in the wake of the rise of populism, became something not beyond the pale. The increased prevalence of both post-truth and post-truth politics do not suggest an end to truth – in a manner akin to Fukuyama’s prediction regarding history. Instead they point to a state where the previous threshold of an accumulation of conflicting evidence is no longer enough to dismantle inaccuracies or ‘alternative facts’.

Instead, it now feels as though we occupy multiple realities at once. As a society we inhabit multiple different versions of the modern day, conflicting opinions and viewpoints buttress up against each other in a vast and ever expanding melting pot of characters. The heady mix of politics and culture, and their blending together, has seen the post-war idea of ‘Big-tent politics’ become a ‘Big-tent society’ – and one that invariably sees a space where the right operate and move more successfully than the left.

So how then do we achieve critical cut- through? How do we hold power to account? In the twentieth century we saw the rise of concepts around ‘speaking truth to power’,⁵ but in the twenty-first century this phrase is frequently co- opted by agitators and commentators on the right who routinely act as courtiers rather than critical voices in a deeply saturated, but equally benign, political discourse. Additionally, as Chomsky rightfully points out, power already knows truth⁶ and, instead we should look to build a coalition of trust through highlighting the injustices suffered by victims of power. But how to do this in a post-truth society where the 24-hour news cycle is quick to shout ‘fake news’ and chide any meaningful debate? And what role does photography and other visual languages play in informing and progressing this debate?

Photography

“When we speak of “shooting” with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence” ― Teju Cole⁷

Whilst many themes and avenues exist in Afshar’s ‘Agonistes’, the central actors and primary subject is that of whistleblowers and their treatment by the Australian state. A state that, despite passing numerous laws in recent years regarding the protection of whistleblowers, meets them with increasing hostility and makes use of all the tools in their arsenal, such as gag orders, legal proceedings, fines, and imprisonment to not only silence these specific individuals, but suppress any meaningful discourse on the topics they have raised – even passing specific laws regarding discussing Australia’s immigration centres.⁸ The nine individuals that feature in the work are all former employees of governmental agencies, such as the military, immigration, or youth detention. Nine who chose to speak out and not remain silent to the injustices they witnessed, nine who have felt the full-weight of the state’s power.

What does this say about Australia? What does this say about all of us? When I think about Ireland, where I am based, I am reminded of the cruelty of its Direct Provision system?⁹ Or in the adjacent UK, where its media landscape has been dominated by Brexit for over five years now, a landscape where phrases like ‘Australian-style points-based system’ are bandied about with no real critical analysis into what exactly that phrase means or how it plays out in real life – just this summer, plans were muted for an ‘Australian-style offshore centre’ as part of the UK government’s Nationality and Borders Bill. In a year where the wider public discourse has been filled with terminologies like ‘test and trace’ and ‘stay home, save lives’, it seems as though slogans carry more weight than meaningful critical or public discourse when it comes to topics like this. It is through this lens that the cruciality of Afshar’s work can be seen. It serves as a litmus test for democracy and its health, not just in Australia but in other ‘democratic’ nations. Criticism of democracy is vital for its survival. A healthy democracy lives parallel to its criticism, it is part of its purpose, part of its process. It is the means by which it calibrates its actions. When absent, it forms an incomplete picture, like the eyes missing in ‘Agonistes’ democracy is blind to itself without criticism – it is an intolerant form of democracy, it is totalitarianism.

The artist manages to successfully critique both her subject matter and method of delivery in a wonderful act of cognitive dissonance. By underscoring the strengths in photography, and particularly documentary photography, we observe its shortcomings. In the stills, which are drawn from 110 lenses, we are presented with a single representation. A representation that is notable due to the absence of the sitter’s perspective, highlighted via their absent eyes. This echoes the construct of singular narratives in the media, which, though purported as being objective, become subjective through the information excluded. We are reminded of photography’s role in colonialism and how it frequently operated as the shutter of imperialism. The medium was hijacked long ago by power structures, and as a modern-day visual language, we continue to use it unconsciously in a manner that maintains its inherent bias; Afshar nudges us to remember that a lack of intent does not mitigate the impact of our actions – as Sekula noted ‘all communication is, to a greater or lesser extent, tendentious; all messages are manifestations of interest’.¹⁰

Projection

“The women and men in this drama share a similar history and fate... they found themselves drawn into a context – an agon – between conscience and the law” ― Hoda Afshar¹¹

In the canon of many religions there exists the concept of a second death – a death beyond the physical death. And whilst the mechanisms of this manifest themselves in many different forms, in Abrhamic religions it takes the form of a post-mortem judgement of the soul, whilst in Mandaeism, a gnostic religion, unpurified souls will be destroyed at the end of days, the central theme of an existence beyond our physical bodies permeates. In Ancient Greece this obsession led Achilles to reject a long and uneventful life in favour of a short but glory filled one – a fate that the hero subsequently regrets when Odysseus encounters the hero in the afterlife in the Odyssey. The establishment of a legacy to cement a name in the annals of history has proved just as intoxicating throughout the ages, confirmed with a glance at buildings and places like Carnegie Hall and Rockefeller Plaza, and frequently these stories become more alluring when they feature an anti-hero or a rags to riches element, or even redemption. ‘Agonistes’ projects a more tragic tale – a tale of those who suffered not for fame or fortune, but for justice. Those who knew that their actions would, in the best possible outcome, see anonymity, but knew that severe struggles would be ahead. 2020 brought with it many terrible things and moments, but it also provided periods of reflection – and often these periods of reflection were in direct response to those terrible moments. At the onset of Covid-19 we saw collective discussions around how frontline workers were treated and valued; following George Floyd’s brutal murder, we saw renewed discussions around race – but frequently these discussions were instances of those inflicting pain and damage finally listening to those suffering. The gig economy and zero-hour contracts, the trauma suffered by bodies of colour by institutional and societal racism – these are not new phenomena.

This theme of reflection brought with it, among many things, a discussion around statues and provided collective moments where debates around what values we wanted to present, and ultimately represent us, in public spaces. If these monuments project our national values, then what values do we want to be defined by? As part of ‘Agonistes’, Afshar presented large-scale photographs of the series in Melbourne. This placement, aside from making something that the Australian government wants to keep invisible, very visible, reminds us that we are still in a period where democracy is fragile and malleable enough for it to be shaped in a manner that could be improved, but also in a manner that sees us regress. The origins of modern democracy are often told as a philosophical tale of ancient Greek thinkers debating the process of majority rule, whereas most modern democratic structures are based on the Roman model with its roots in military conquest and empires – after all, America named its upper house after the Roman Senate and not the Greek Ecclesia. By calling attention to the plight of whistleblowers, Afshar accentuates the power of the political system, but also the means by which to challenge it: awareness.

Purpose

“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” ― Walter Benjamin¹²

One of the enduring strengths of ‘Agonistes’ is that whilst the artist herself has meticulously and sensitively crafted her own visual language to deliver her work, it does not focus on a single visual language for its interpretation by an audience. Instead, it highlights the proliferation of many, encouraging the viewer to engage with it on different fronts, using a multitude of approaches. That said, we see clear nods to the Greco-Roman world with the work’s title – the etymology of which comes from the Greek word for ‘agon’ meaning a conflict or struggle, which played out in Ancient Greek theatre via those for (prot-agon-ist) and against (ant-agon-ist) – and the almost universally recognised and understood visual metaphor of blanched-marble statues and their associated aesthetic. The use of these symbols makes them culturally referenceable and, to this end, the series becomes as much a commentary on methods of translation as it does on language of delivery.

A healthy amount of discomfort exists when viewing and translating the work. We see trauma enacted on white bodies, but it is from a distance, reminding us of the long history of trauma and fetisisation of violence against bodies of colour. We can see this play out in Western media where for over a year as Covid-19 ravaged predominantly white bodies we did not see gymnasiums in Tennessee or morgues in Bristol piled high with bodies, but almost immediately, as it took hold in India, we were swamped with images and scenes of bodies burning along the Ganges. We see the whistleblowers recall their tale and are reminded of those that are voiceless, powerless, and trapped in the many systems that exist across the world that project an air of protection, but for those who sit inside not outside it. We see the use of seemingly perfect technology creating a likeness and how it can fall short in capturing certain elements and perspectives. All of this reminds us that Photography is the name that we give to a process of creating visual documents that communicate much broader concepts and themes – and often these are communicated in too narrow a fashion – and like any word we use to try to articulate the idea or document of something, it is not the thing itself. Afshar’s ‘Agonistes’ highlights that no matter how good we get at making those simulacrums, they can never be that; it also reminds us that all too frequently, in this era of post-truth politics, those copies never wanted to be that thing in the first place.