These last two posts have been filled with reader-directed questions. This is intentional. My aim with these posts is to provoke discussion and introduce questions that may not have occurred to the reader or to the visitor of the exhibition. I am attempting to create an engaged viewership, one who questions instead of assumes. I realize this results in an absence of my personal opinions but I believe this is necessary as I do not want my view or perspective to shift yours in any way. I see myself as a facilitator rather than a commentator.
When we look at photographs we have to realize that they are the photographer’s interpretation of events. They do not necessarily depict the real – but rather have a relationship to it. They are, in a sense, a social act for we interact with them – more so, I would argue, than a painting. We feel a connection to those captured in the image as, to put it simply, they look like us, they could be us. They are not rendered using paint or any other artistic materials. It appears as though an actual moment in time has been frozen and brought forward to our present and, in many respects, it has.
Documentary photography has historically aimed to capture social ills and bring them to the public’s attention. Too Young to Wed follows that vein. When we hear the word “document,” our immediate association is, generally, “truth.” Documents are verifiable data, or so we believe. However, as I mentioned earlier, photographs are interpretations, regardless of the multiple assurances that personal bias doesn’t come into play. Knowing this, it becomes important to be aware of the associations we invoke when we hear certain words. What if this exhibition consisted of aesthetic photography? Would our immediate associations and views of the photographs change from when we believed them to be documents? I think it is important to be aware of the impact text can have on how we view and interpret photographs.
I believe that these photographs by Stephanie Sinclair are both aesthetically beautiful and relevant documents. I don’t believe that one has to exist without the other and neither do visitors, many of whom have commented on the images’ beauty along with their relevance as documents of child marriage. As a photographer, Sinclair uses many visual techniques to convey meaning – albeit a meaning of her choosing. In an image of two married couples, Tehani age 8 and her husband Majed age 25, who stand behind her former classmate and her husband (both unnamed), Sinclair stresses the physical height differential between the men and the women. However, this arrangement also stresses an invisible differential – that of power. It is clear in the photograph that the husbands are dominant over their wives. Rather than explicitly depicting this, Sinclair does it implicitly – by the way she chose to position and capture her four subjects.
When looking at photographs it is important to ask two questions: For what purpose were these photographs taken? and How does the photographer use visual techniques to convey this purpose?