This is an abridged version of a paper I presented at The Bodies in Between conference at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania (May 2014).
(Image - The Toronto Star, June 14th, 2013- Link)
In June 2013 a Canadian school
photograph was reproduced in the press that depicts a child with a visible
disability separated from the rest of an able-bodied class. Seven year-old Miles Ambridge, a pupil at
Herbert Spencer Elementary in New Westminster, British Columbia appears in the
class photo “leaning from his wheelchair, an empty space separating
him from his classmates,” (Toronto Star, 2013).
This image, as Canadian national, federal and municipal publications
attested, (including The Globe and Mail, The Province and The Toronto Star)
clearly depicts the discriminatory act of being set aside. The Province newspaper,
for example, described the arrangement of the class in the photograph “as
having one student missing” and that Miles was separated from the group by an
“obvious gap” (The Province, 2013). The Globe and Mail newspaper also stated
that class photos are often unremarkable and forgettable but this image “was
anything but forgettable” (Globe & Mail, 2013).
Thirty years ago
Paul Berger stated (in a catalogue for The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle) that
“the meaning of the photograph does not reside in its physical structure, but
rather in the dynamic and negotiating interaction between ourselves, our
culture and the image in question,” (Paul Berger, 1983). In 2013, this school photograph produced by
Lifetouch Canada, a portrait photography company that brands itself as a
“community partner” that makes communities “happier, stronger, safer,”
(lifetouch.ca/lifetouch-gives-back, 2014) reproduced an image that clearly
represents the ongoing negotiation between particular kinds of bodies, our
cultures and (or our communities) and the images that represent our culture.
Despite Lifetouch’s community orientated commercial mandate this image
recognizes a clear social distinction between one kind of body and others and
its subsequent exclusion and then reproduces this physical and social act as an
image. Consequently, if this portrait company is seeking to make communities
“happier, stronger safer” it seems this photograph, if it does portray a
dynamic negotiation between ourselves and our cultures, as Paul Berger states,
represents a strengthening of community by visually rendering an act of social
exclusion.
In some respects
the discernible appearance of an act of bodily discrimination in a photograph,
is absurd. As Miles’ mother asserted in The Toronto Star at the time “I
couldn’t comprehend how the photographer could look through the lens and think
that this was good composition . . . this just boggled the mind” (Toronto Star,
2013). According to The Globe & Mail even a Lifetouch Canada representative
acknowledged that the photograph “wasn’t done right” (Globe & Mail, 2013).
However, the students and a teacher in this class photograph were positioned
within the frame accordingly and the photograph was developed by Lifetouch
Canada and sent to the school, and subsequently the student’s families, without
any recognition of a fault. The school principle is even quoted as saying that
“the company didn’t immediately
see anything wrong with the photo. It took some coaxing until Lifetouch agreed
the separation of Miles from his class was a mistake and offered to retake the
photo” (The Province, 2013).
One way of comprehending how this photograph was taken, developed and
commercially distributed is to understand the image as an ideological
representation of a norm in contemporary society, and that norms, as Michel
Foucault interprets them, are sustained in their continual reproduction.
Foucault submits, by comparing, differentiating, homogenizing, hierarchizing
and excluding in everyday practice, which in this case includes photography,
norms are maintained by regulating the appearance and experience of the human
body (Foucault, 1975).
This image clearly establishes that a norm of social exclusion can exist
between those with so-called normal and abnormal bodies by comparing one kind
of body to another, differentiating between a school class and a class mate,
homogenizing this image as a normal depiction, hierarchizing a group of
importance against a supposed lesser individual and fundamentally excluding
Miles Ambridge from the others in the group. It is through these five mechanisms
that the photograph was taken, not through an explicit act of considered
discrimination but through “the universal reign of the normative,” (Foucault,
1975) which is maintained, as Foucault suggests, on all levels and in all forms
and includes the differentiation and exclusion of the disabled body as an
inscribed and naturalized social practice, which was then arranged, developed
and reproduced in the construction of a class photo.
Furthermore, to understand why an act of social exclusion is considered
normal and totally inscribed into a photographic practice to go unnoticed (at
least initially by Lifetouch Canada) is to acknowledge that, in some quarters,
it seems acceptable to compare, differentiate, homogenize, hierarchize and exclude
particular kinds of bodies from others. For Foucault such practices are
techniques of power, which organize human bodies to deliver a required
ideological representation of society (Foucault, 1975). Thus, the human body is
conceived as an effect and instrument of political and economic strategies both
as a subjected manifestation and a productive force so bodies that exist
outside of this system, which may not be considered practically or economically
useful, such as the disabled body, are therefore, compared and differentiated
from the accepted social body, homogenized as an unacceptable political and
economic instrument, hierarchized into a lower social domain and ultimately
excluded so that the so-called normal, able and, therefore, consistently
dependable and productive body is preserved as the ideal form for ideologically
maintaining and representing a society both politically and economically.
Contemporary disability studies texts build on Foucault’s articulation
of the complexity of power relations subjected on the body to comprehend why
disabled bodies can be ideologically disqualified. Leading critical disability
studies scholars such as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Robert
Murphy have all enlarged on Foucault’s apprehension of disciplined,
medicalized, sexualized and (fundamentally) categorized bodies to include the
disabled body.
Lennard Davis, for example, argues that industrialization and capitalism
redefined the acceptable human body both as able-bodied worker (Davis, 1996)
and as an active consumer (Davis, 2002) so that those that are physically or
mentally challenged and, thus, cannot adequately work or consume are then
collectively considered abnormal. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson claims that “the
disabled body exposes the illusion of autonomy, self-government and
self-determination that underpins the fantasy of absolute able-bodies,” which
The Global North requires (Garland-Thomson, 1997). Thomson even accounts for four primary visual rhetorics of disability, found in photography,
which differentiate the disabled subject. These include the wondrous, which conceives of
disability as exceptional, the sentimental, that positions the disabled subject
as a sympathetic victim with a problem to overcome, the exotic or the alien,
which sensationalizes a sense of otherness and the seemingly mundane or
familiar, which may be applicable to the class photo in question (Garland-Thomson, 2002) considering that this
class photo may depict a seemingly mundane or familiar and, therefore, normal occurrence. Robert Murphy argues that the disabled body is understood as an
unpredictable and problematic form (especially for contemporary industrialized
consumer societies) and is, thus, conceived of as socially dangerous (Murphy et
al, 1988).
Taking these perspectives into account it is apparent that for a
disciplined society to be regulated according to the political economy of the
body, the bodies that do not fit within this system have to not only be
differentiated and excluded but also consensually understood as differentiated
and excluded. However, in order for this differentiation and exclusion to be
sustained and validated as acceptable social behaviour, acts that ostracize and
prohibit bodies that do not fit within modern political economies have to
manifest in common, habitual and normalized practices that demonstrate a form
of shared knowledge, which supports the political economy of the body. So that
the class photo taken in 2013 not only differentiates and excludes for
political and economic reasons linked to the capitalist system but also
maintains an unacknowledged or internalized bodily “common-sense” assumption (that
conceives the disabled body as an object worthy of exclusion) which is,
therefore, reproduced in the practice of taking the class photo and is
subsequently unacknowledged by the photographic practitioners as an image that represents anything out of the ordinary.
Roland Barthes states in the Rhetoric
of the Image that photography represents the limit of meaning tied to a
process of signification so that the literal message contained in a photograph
appears as a support for the symbolic message (Barthes, 1977). As Barthes
submits, the literalness of the image is sufficient because it presents a “kind
of natural being-there of objects”
(Barthes, 1977) in both the mechanical process of taking a photograph and the
formalness of arrangement. This sufficient literalness, in turn, substitutes
for the symbolic meaning (it may depict) to create the myth of objectivity.
Therefore, if denotation naturalizes the connotation to appear as a
“pseudo-truth,” when it is a culturally constructed or “a message without a code,”
(Barthes, 1977) which has had its coded content removed by the illusion of its
objectivity, photography is an ideological practice, especially when
considering Foucault’s contention that ideological power “is tolerable only on
the condition that it mask a substantial part of itself” and “its success is
proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanism” (Foucault, 1976). If
photography is to be successful, then, as an ideological practice it has to be
able to mask a substantial part of itself, which according to Barthes is the
symbolic content or the mechanism of producing connotations, so the photograph
is tolerated as a message without a code, when in fact it is heavily coded or,
moreover as Barthes argues, “the common domain of the signifieds is that of
ideology” (Barthes, 1977).
Therefore, the ideological message contained in the class photo is a
symbolic representation of the social exclusion of the disabled body, that is
supported by the literal depiction of a small boy physically separated from the
rest of his class. However, the implicit symbolic message conveyed (that this
class room division represents a larger ideological social division) is
tolerable because the connotation (that it is normal to imply that the disabled
body should be separated and excluded from its able-bodied companions) is
subsequently masked by the literalness of the image. Consequently
the reason the photographer “could look through the lens and think that this
was good composition” (Toronto Star, 2013) was because the myth of objectivity
created by the being-there of objects, seemingly masked the symbolic meaning of positioning the
students in a certain way, which is otherwise heavily coded. Once the image was conceived of as an literal discriminatory
representation (by the elementary school and Miles’ parents) and eventually
understood as “not done right” by Lifetouch Canada (Globe & Mail, 2013) the
representational power of the image, to produce a normative bodily assumption,
was diminished because it unmasked its ideological function to move from
suggesting a form of implicit knowledge to explicitly depicting an act of
intolerable discrimination.
As this highly
publicized instance of photographic misconduct demonstrates the disabled body
can be understood as a body that exists in a liminal social condition. As
Robert Murphy (et al) contends, “Liminal people, as the word denotes, are at a
threshold. They are marginal to society – poised perhaps to enter, but still
outside its boundaries” (Murphy et al, 1988).
The disabled body, then, in some respects, is the quintessential body
in-between. A body on a threshold or
positioned on a boundary between material visibility and social invisibility,
both literal and suggested, outside the requirements of a political economy but
part of human society, unacknowledged as a victim of discrimination but
representing the norm of social exclusion, existing as an object in a singular
explicit image or a subject of shared implicit knowledge and belonging to a
school class but not (in some respects) belonging in a class photograph.
Moreover, Murphy
comprehends disability itself, and not just it’s social appearance and
experience, as a liminal condition, when stating “disability is also an
in-between state, for the person is neither sick nor well, neither fully alive
nor quite dead,” (Murphy et al, 1988) which is not a position I agree with but
one that may account for a hierarchy of bodily norms that value one kind of
more able, consistent and supposedly normal body over another and the consensual
acceptance of this bodily hierarchy as an established certainty. However, the
bigger problem that a naturalized acceptance of bodily norms highlights,
especially when disability is conceived of as an in-between state between
sickness and health or life and death, is that intrinsically all human bodies
exist as bodies in-between. We are all able and disabled alike, between states
of sickness and health and on the boundary of the potentiality of life and the
eventual threshold of death. This is because the human body in its “normative
posture” (Foucault, 1973) opposes the universal experience of living in a
biological body, a form that inherently, physically, mentally and mortally
challenges any notion of desired productivity and durability, and is, thus,
“the fictitious atom of an ideological representation of society” (Foucault,
1975).
Therefore, the
fantasy of the political economy of the body requires consistently healthy and
productive human bodies in order to sustain a consistently healthy and productive
social body. Consequently, those in society with naturally inconsistent bodies
that appear to have visible disabilities are compared, differentiated, homogenized, hierarchized and excluded, as the
material evidence of the class photo and the immaterial conditions that allowed
for its reproduction demonstrated. The so-called abnormal body is represented
as the necessary object worthy of social exclusion so that the fantasy of a
normal body is maintained. So that in photography, as in life, the quintessential
body in-between is constructed as the disabled body when a liminal existence, a
life on the threshold of all meanings and potentialities is the very condition of human experience, which is shared by all.
