Juste des images

Just Images

For centuries the West has ensured its prosperity by exploiting much of the rest of the world. A recently published work, the monumental

Sexe, race et colonies,( 1) gives an insight into all the aspects of sexual representation linked to Western domination, before and after colonization. From the outset sex saturated the discovery of other populations by European invaders torn between the attraction of the foreign body and the phobia of hybridization. As Achille Mbembe says in his preface, colonization offered a unique perspective on the sexual drive, not only because the enforcement of law was suspended, but also because the meeting of bodies was re-enacted in an almost original way. As an instrument of the sexualization of indigenous bodies and witness to their unfettered use by the colonizer, material of an exoticerotic imaginary omnipresent in Western popular culture, photography clearly occupies a central place in this history.The documentation compiled by the authors is impressive, including men’s outings to Bousbir, fashion advertising, pornography, sexual tourism and contemporary art striving to challenge enduring representations. A group of particularly painful images (chosen, according to the book’s co-editor Pascal Blanchard from some 5,000 to 7,000 of the same type) depicts smiling settlers and soldiers showing off naked young women like trophies, the men’s hands on the women’s breasts or their genitalia. As is to be expected an open letter quickly protested, in the name of respect for the victims, the publication of these images and their reproduction in the press.(2) Let’s pass on the puerile temptation of censorship, which has become a kind of reflex. The issues this manifesto raises are emblematic of the fundamental questions about our relationship to photography, particularly that of the body. Of course these images must be shown; no, the materiality of the image, its power to challenge, cannot be reduced to its verbal equivalent. Reading the descriptions of violent or sexual images is a different experience from looking at them and confronting the discomfort that always arises from the representation of the body. This means that the image is, as Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘just an image’, that the representation of reality is not reality, even if the today’s excessive production of images could make you forget that. Exhibiting the naked body can be an act of violence, result from violence, be testament to systematic violence. Considering it as a defilement of the person photographed amounts to making the colonizer’s gaze one’s own. It is precisely the absence of judgement that makes Mao Ishikawa’s images of prostitutes and their GI Afro-American clients in Okinawa so invaluable; Denis Darzacq’s images of disabled people owe their validity to the photograph’s capacity to put reality at a distance. The works of Ishikawa and Darzacq are presented in the dossier dedicated to Paris Photo. Both are powerfully political because they are free of any moral judgement.

Laurent Perez Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney