Against Neutrality
An Open Letter to Diversify Photo
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part…and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop…”
- Mario Savio
Dear Diversify,
Like a camera, an institution is only an apparatus. Through intention and directive, both can be participants in certain kinds of work. Institutions often facilitate the pursuit of some kind of “mission” established by “statements.” Cameras produce photographs and, while those two components make up the greater part of a practice based on seeing and looking, neither does the work of seeing or looking; much like how the adoption of a “mission statement” is not that mission’s completion. These are manufactured things and, as such, can fail in the hands of those who command them.
In November, along with For Our Colleagues, in a letter titled “This Must Stop,” you both called for an end to the “killing of journalists…covering the Israeli bombardment in Gaza and Lebanon, and the escalating violence in the region.” In April, an equally passive statement was made. One doesn’t have to be a writer to identify these as passive and neutral. The word “this,” is especially vapid, its imprecision swallows everything that follows. It can only carry us to its interrogative partner, what. What must stop? Is it misery and destruction? Pain and death? Then in the words of Ghassan Kanafani “the misery and the destruction and the pain and the death of whom?”
You state that “Diversify,” is “an action – an intentional movement to break with the predominantly colonial and patriarchal eye…” But as neo-settler-colonial regimes enact atrocities unlike anything captured before, you’ve taken no tangible action. Not a single true word for Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, Congo & countless other nations (from which so much of your community hails) suffering under the scourge of colonial tyranny. What you call breaking from the “colonial and patriarchal…” has been known as many things: Marronage and the restless flight of the enslaved Africans of the diaspora, stealing themselves away from property, fighting into personhood; Intifada, and the Palestinian “shaking off” of the ongoing Israeli apartheid regime. You say “break with” but what have you broken?
It is not enough to rally the marginalized into a collective if said collective is beholden to the same machinery as that which it is pledged to “break with.” To do so is merely to perform or cosplay liberatory practice, saying all the right words but doing none of the required work. As with the circulation of imagery, the mere assemblage of marginalized image-makers “cannot alone constitute a form of justice,” to borrow from David Campany. What good is an organization that is willing to lobby for the employment of those disproportionately impacted by colonization, but not willing to lobby for their survival? Like Women Photograph, PEN America, Poetry Foundation, and several other organizations, you want to be trusted in your allegiance to a cause against tyranny. But you also want to be “good.” You want to be accepted into the machine, as it is. Hence, “safe” speech and neutrality.
As with settler-colonialism, neutrality’s work is erasure and unmaking. Through neutrality’s vacuous excavation, discord is bulldozed, bombed, and raized into a “safe” middle ground. So in this sunken hour, calling for an end to ruthless decimation but refusing to name its perpetrator is an act as violent as the decimation itself. It is an unmaking. Suddenly, there are no genocides at all. Not even one. The city “...plunge[s] into darkness,” the land tears open to leave homes in rubble, the sky lights itself on fire, hostages are “detainees,” kidnappings are “arrests,” everyone is a victim, and the enemy is not named because they do not exist.
Such language doesn’t speak. It merely alludes to an ambiguous danger and falls into the ambient static of a percussive repetition persisting with the precision of algorithm and the constancy of daylight: jet propulsion, missiles, scope calibration, gunfire, drone automation, white phosphorous, national anthems, and bomb after bomb after bomb after— all sung to drown desperate cries of Palestinians while they are murdered in their sleep. This is not accidental. This is the physical manifestation of “The Two-State Solution” and “National Interest.”
But if the state’s language can be physical, so too must ours.
We cannot be good pets and wait for tyranny to call us into being with a pat on the head. Some of us have already been called animals. Get out from behind the viewfinder, look at the regime in its mug, and shit on its carpet. Piss in its cupboards. You must desecrate the machinery whose formality is insistent on degradation. You must make tyranny untenable. Witness, as in passive vision, is not enough. Seeing, and knowing the truth in what you’ve seen, is just the beginning of a labor towards liberation. Bearing testimony of that truth, in actions, carries liberation forward.
As an individual, when I insist that I am a “writer and photographer of the Haitian diaspora,” it isn’t for classification. I am saying “Look at what I have inherited.” Saying I “believe in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of all oppressed people,” is non-negotiable. It is a dictum against which I may be judged, should I ever falter against tyranny no matter its shape, slave, or master. Not simply a red line I will not cross, but an architecture I owe my life to.
Which brings me to ask what Diversify Photo might look like when it is “[breaking] with the predominantly colonial and patriarchal eye;” when it is actively teaching its constituents to identify those things in artistic practice? How might it empower these constituents? Is it willing to lose favor (especially materially) with those uncommitted to its mission? What is its architecture? Where is its red line? Is it in Congo, Haiti, Palestine, Sudan, Yemen, or Lebanon? At this very moment, the living still search beneath the rubble for the martyred. Babies are pulled from the charred wombs of their mothers. Parents hold their limp children up to our eyes. Against the terror of fire, a man lifts his headless child to the world and asks “Is this enough?” How will you answer? You can’t say you weren’t told. You can’t say you didn’t know. You know what medium you wield and its power.
If you, like many others, still choose the banal safety of neutrality even after this, I pray your enterprises fail. I pray that in that safety all language deserts you, words turn to dust in your mouth, and the prisms of your eyes shatter. May that safety grant you the plunder and decimation you were content to observe…and may shame ultimately spur you toward liberation.
Best,
Joshua Thermidor