I suppose that the issue of class is like many other complex social issues in that it is difficult to get at it without recognizing the influence and biases of one’s own social location (relative wealth, education, employment, family, race, ethnicity, etc.). And even if we can catalogue fairly honestly where we sit in each of these categories, our blind spots and unconscious commitments are incredibly stubborn.
Coupled with this is the fact that most (all?) of us are closet moralists. Even if we tell others that we are broadminded and open, very few of us hold our deepest positions lightly: we are convinced that our own views are somehow the right ones. (If we didn’t think that, why would we hold them?). We all make moral judgements and we often use them on other people in black and white ways.
For this reason, I found some of the reading in this section to be difficult. I wonder if it is possible to examine important questions without having the right opinions in advance or without having unimpeachable motives. The comments about about “class tourism” (Sontag, 1977: 57) and “exotic strangers” (Taylor: 1994: 156) seem to spring from judgements about what motivated observers of working class people, but I’m not sure what else can be done in such situations. And I think we continue to face the same challenges: do images of “street people” inform, educate, call forth compassion, titillate or merely exploit? The answer is not obvious because it could probably be any or all of those, whether for the photographer or for the viewer.
While recognizing that the issue will probably never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, it might be useful to turn the question around: what would be lost if members of different “classes” never observed one another? What impetus might there be to improve? What incentive would be there be to respond to injustice and inequities?
Another issue raised by the reading is whether an outsider can be an effective observer of a group. Humphrey Spender may have decided that he could not (Spender, 1982: 16), but I am not sure that this is the case and I suspect that the answer may depend upon what the observer’s purpose is. If the goal is sympathy and alertness to codes and meanings, then the deep knowledge and trust of an insider might be required. If the aim is to create contrast, however, an outsider’s perspective might be invaluable. And the observer will have to face the questions on several planes of nearness and distance at the same time: with the subject, within him/herself and with the eventual viewers of the observation that is created.
The preliminary exercise, in which I took screenshots of coworkers, raised some of these questions for me. For example, I was both one of them (we work together) and apart from them (I concealed from them what I was doing). I was a little uncomfortable with what I was doing (because it was concealed), but I convinced myself that it was benign (because my motives were correct, weren’t they?) and that I wouldn’t get the same unguarded expressions any other way. There is no question in my mind that “the camera would have changed the social chemistry of the scene”—it is the rare person who doesn’t alter their behaviour as soon as they know a camera is present.
The subjects in Richard Billingham’s images do not show the same awareness, likely because they are so used to his camera and because he is clearly an insider. An outsider would not be granted the same privileged access. And it is inevitable that outsiders will make comparisons between themselves and the subjects. I think this is human nature whether the subjects “may seem less than ideal” or not. I suspect that we are all looking to validate ourselves and we use our knowledge of others to do it: I can feel pleased that I am doing better than X, but I can be envious of Y who appears to be doing better than me.
The Self and the Other 