This short essay was originally published in Germany by the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin (LEIZ) at Zeppelin University and formed the basis of a guest lecture I delivered in German on 2 March 2018 at the same institute.
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| The fable of the six blind Men and an Elephant reminds us that "truth" is constructed in our heads. |
The explosion of visual media sharing around the world presents great possibilities but also an urgent need to address the chronic misinterpretation of images and spaces of “cultural others.” The dynamics of making sense of the world, or making truthful assertions about the realities of others, is not a straightforward process because the world appears differently to different people. The meaning and function of objects or concepts are culturally coded, and therefore an interpretation is fixed according to the “cultural toolkit” available to the one perceiving the object or other people.
Philosopher-journalist Walter Lippmann calls it “the pictures in our heads.” These experiential images are impressions and beliefs we accumulate throughout childhood and they shape how we perceive and interact with the world outside.
The famous saying that “seeing is believing” can be misleading because we all use different “pictures in our heads” to make sense of concepts and objects in the world. It is therefore beneficial to interrogate photographic “truthfulness” because we now live in an electronic age where meaning-making is causing a great deal of social, psychological and cultural disempowerment.
Consider, for instance, the word “chair.” According to the Oxford Dictionary, a chair is “a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs.” This is taken for granted in communities with such seating arrangements, but it is totally confusing when the word crosses geographic spaces to rural communities where people traditionally squat or sit on straw mats and reserve the three-legged wooden kigoda (chair) for elders, esteemed visitors and disabled people.
Increasingly, culture is forced to speak with one voice and this opens up infinite problems because we represent phenomena as if our experiences are the same the world over. Furthermore, when we quantify abstract concepts like “success” or “happiness”, we reinforce a universal way of seeing, which leads to negative comparisons, discontent, envy, aggressive competition instead of cooperation, migration at any cost and, of course, greed and corruption.
The process of standardising concepts is not accidental. Therefore, I would like to shed light on the historical trajectory that favoured seeing as an objective way of knowing. Berthold-Bond’s Hegel’s Grand Synthesis: A Study of Being, Thought, and History explains that “history exhibits the relation of consciousness to the world, and this developing relation constitutes our knowledge, our appropriation of truth.”
As my focus is photographic imagery, I will limit the backward glance to the nineteenth century because it was marked by unprecedented contact between Europe and Africa and invented ways of explaining human differences based on the racial assumptions of Victorian evolutionary anthropology. The development of the camera as a tool of scientific inquiry allowed the documentation of non-Europeans to take the form of visible evidence. Charles Darwin routinely used photographs, and his illustrated masterpiece Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871) was the first manual to use photographs to illustrate a scientific theory. Descent of Man (1874), which is Darwin’s scientific framework on how humankind and human society should be understood, used considerable visual descriptions about other races that claimed to be objective in the Hegelian sense of ‘pure looking’ (reines Zusehen).
In fact, the notion that “seeing is believing” had immense social and cultural impact at the time because visual representations of non-Europeans were seen as mirrors of their cultural and racial development. Indeed, photographic accuracy cannot be disputed but, aesthetically, the image is never innocent.
Richard Avedon puts it this way:
“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth!”