1
1 Photography, public pedagogy and the politics of place-making in post-
2 industrial areas
3 Maarten Loopmans1, Gillian Cowell 2 and Stijn Oosterlynck 3 4 5 DRAFT – not to be further circulated or quoted without permission from the authors 6 7 Abstract: This paper discusses the way in which public photographic depictions of places
8 and place-based communities contribute to the construction of local identity and community
9 building. Being public and visualised statements about what a place and the people living
10 there are and what they are not, photographs incite public debate about place and community.
11 The paper discusses two interventions, one in Ghent, Belgium involving professional
12 photographers from outside the neighbourhood, and one in Bonnybridge, Scotland involving
13 amateur photography by local residents. Both are attempts by community workers to
14 encourage citizens to discuss alternative realities of themselves, their neighbours and their
15 neighbourhood. Combining theories on place-making and public pedagogy, we reveal how
16 both nonetheless exemplify very different strategies to democratize community building
17 processes.
18
19 Introduction
20
1 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES), K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. 2 [email protected]
3 2 Doctoral Research Student, School of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland UK; Community 4 Learning and Development Worker, Falkirk Council, Scotland. [email protected]
5 3 Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium. 6 [email protected]
7 2
1 Local community has become an increasingly important vehicle for, and target of attempts to,
2 rebuild and strengthen place-based forms of social cohesion in our societies (DeFilippis and
3 North, 2004, Lepofsky and Fraser, 2003). However, community-based forms of planning
4 have been shown to produce contradictory results. While some authors argue that they uphold
5 the potential to include marginalized urban communities in decision-making arenas, others
6 point out that they strengthen the voices of already powerful groups, such as the gentrifying
7 urban middle classes in the remaking of places (Loopmans, 2008).
8
9 The purpose of this paper is to consider the role of photographic interventions as a tool of
10 public pedagogy in community-based planning and to assess its democratizing potential. We
11 first examine the theoretical linkage between place-making, photography and public
12 pedagogy and explain how photographic interventions can be seen as public pedagogy
13 projects. Secondly, we discuss two photographic projects: ‘Lijn 3’ in Gent, Belgium and
14 ‘This Is Not Bonnybridge’ in Bonnybridge, Scotland. Both projects incited a debate on local
15 identity. A comparison of both cases reveals how Gert Biesta’s theory on public pedagogy
16 (Biesta, 2011) can enrich the debate on art, community building and place-making. While
17 both cases intervene in the production of meaning and identity, they are shown to differ in the
18 character of their pedagogical ambitions and effects.
19
20 Photography and the social construction of place
21 Geographers have long acknowledged the social construction of places as against an
22 essentialist understanding of place. Place-identities are being formed in a social and political
23 process in which the exchange of meaning takes a prominent place (Martin, 2003a). Place-
24 making is considered a relational process (Massey, 2004, 2005; Pierce et al., 2011) which
25 assembles place-elements in bundles of meaning to construct identities. This development of 3
1 a shared local identity can be considered a process of social or everyday learning (Ingold,
2 2000; Mcfarlane, 2011). Place-making is also political for its inherent selectivity: Firstly,
3 particular identities are constructed by selecting specific place-elements or prioritizing some
4 over others. Shared understandings of place identities are assembled through struggle,
5 negotiation and communication (Pierce, Martin & Murphy, 2011). Opposing interests may
6 appear as to which elements are included in or omitted from collectively shared place
7 identities. Secondly, the construction of place identities is political in the sense that it is, in
8 return, meaningful for political mobilization. Place identities can become powerful bases for
9 mobilisation or collective action (e.g. Cox, 1998; Le Galès, 2000; Elwood, 2006; Nicholls,
10 2009). Martin (2003b) considers place identities as ‘place frames’ for collective action:
11 selective, but shared experiences and understandings of collective interests which can
12 stimulate collective organization and mobilization.
13
14 Place-making is an ongoing, dialectic and contingent process. Whereas places might appear
15 to have a stable identity, they are confronted with constant attempts at redefinition.
16 Community building initiatives often consciously engage with place making. Photography in
17 particular is increasingly used in neighbourhood projects (such as photovoice projects, see
18 Wang e.a. 2004; Strack e.a. 2004) for its perceived capacity to represent and open out life in
19 all its variety, nuance and incompleteness. The taking, exhibiting and viewing of the
20 photograph is a political process involved with the ways in which political subjects articulate
21 themselves and their surroundings (Hawkins 2010; McNamara 2009; Fiona D. Mackenzie
22 2006).
23
24 Photography as representation 4
1 In the present article, our focus is on photography projects which engage in the politics of
2 place-making with an explicit purpose of empowerment and emancipation. The
3 representational capacities of photographs have received considerable attention in this
4 respect. Photo-documentary in particular is part of a long tradition of ‘representing’
5 marginalized groups and exposing injustices in human experience (Clarke, 1997; Burrows,
6 2002). Photo documentaries by professional photographers have been considered a powerful
7 tool in this for two distinct reasons. Firstly, photo documentaries build upon a photograph’s
8 distinct capacity to convince us of its simple correspondence to a distant or past reality
9 (Walton, 1984; Dant & Gilloch, 2002). This capacity has been noted as specific to
10 photography by early photography critics as Susan Sontag (1977) and Roland Barthes (1977;
11 1980). Benjamin’s analysis of the political promise of the photograph builds on exactly this: a
12 photograph’s capacity to reveal, to bring things closer to us, to introduce a critical proximity
13 to distant realities which necessitates political judgement: ‘is it not the task of the
14 photographer... to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his photographs?’ (Benjamin,
15 1985, 256).Secondly, documentary photography has a tradition of adding to its realism a
16 degree of emotional aesthetics which triggers reactions from the audience (Fitzgerald, 2002).
17 This aesthetics requires craftsmanship or a sensitivity for what Henri Cartier-Bresson (1958)
18 called ‘the decisive moment’. Throughout the history of photo-documentaries, the artists’
19 sense for focus, composition, light, colour has been deployed to enhance the impact of a
20 picture and adorn the pictured reality with theoretical contextualisation (Sassen, 2011). The
21 goal of the documentarian, Kay (2011) writes, “is to create a normative shift: to invoke a
22 visceral emotional reaction—outrage, shame, sadness—that compels, motivates, and
23 obligates a larger audience to act.” Critics have confronted these qualities of photo
24 documentary for representation as inherently contradictory. Firstly, the potential of
25 photographs to represent realities has been suggested to undermine its emotional power by 5
1 inducing a ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999). Even the most shocking pictures turn banal
2 when represented over and over again; the infinite stream of ‘shocking truths’ renders the
3 viewer numb and indifferent (Sontag, 1977; Dean, 2003).
4 Secondly, the emotional aesthetics of the photographer have been described as manipulative
5 manufacturing of a non-existent but suggested reality. Photo documentaries’ emotional
6 qualities are susceptible to use for propagandist causes by authors from across the political
7 spectrum in the creation of powerful collective identities (Carlebach 1988; Woller, 1999;
8 Finnegan 2010), thereby objectifying and de-individualizing the subjects represented through
9 the pictures (Natanson, 1992). Moreover, the very visceral qualities of a photograph
10 potentially stimulate reject as much as affect from the audience (Rose, 2006). Fitzgerald
11 describes how ‘eroticised’ photographic depictions of unknown or distant social milieux “can
12 have the effect of Othering the subject” (Fitzgerald, 2002, p. 374). . In the end, “the powerful,
13 the established, the male, the colonizer typically portray the less powerful, less established,
14 female, and colonized” (Harper, 1998, p.140) thus casting their dominant gaze upon them and
15 negatively affecting the validity of other ways of viewing social difference.
16 Partly in response to this critique, auto-photography projects have developed and gained
17 prominence in place-making in the past decades. As a blend of autobiography and
18 photography, auto-photography projects like Photovoice have been suggested to directly
19 empower or ‘give voice to’ subaltern groups by giving over the camera to them (Wang &
20 Burris, 1997; Dodman, 2003; Johnson, May & Cloke, 2008). Its success is assigned to a
21 number of unique characteristics of photography as a means of communication. Firstly,
22 photography, as opposed to writing, is considered to be a particularly accessible form of
23 communication. The camera is able to document ‘the subject’s perceptual orientation with a
24 minimum of training’ (Ziller and Smith 1977, 173). Secondly, a photograph, in being a direct
25 and straightforward representation of the world, is also proposed as a robust means of 6
1 communication. Photographs are able to ‘undermine the implicit authority of the written
2 word’ (Walker 1993, 73) which remains too often the privilege of the educated. Thirdly,
3 auto-photography is a practice which resists and redirects the dominant gaze, as it represents
4 a way of ‘looking alongside’ rather than ‘looking at’ the subjects depicted (Kindon, 2003).
5 Finally, auto-photography can also engender social action as it can be a tool to reach, inform
6 and organize community members (Wang & Burris, 1997). To the auto-photographer,
7 photographs raise critical awareness of the self and its social condition as they become
8 “...actual or metaphoric examples of his or her life world” (Armstrong 2005: 34). Mackenzie
9 (2006) emphasizes how visual images can underpin a culture of resistance revealing
10 unwanted, hidden realities and unveiling the contradictions of particular constellations of
11 power.
12 Critics dismiss the somewhat naïve and artificial equation of auto-photography with
13 autonomous representation. Auto-photographers cannot avoid controversy amongst their
14 peers about the representations produced of themselves and their communities (Williams &
15 Lykes, 2003). Even within the group of photographers themselves, conflicts can occur
16 (McIntyre & Lykes, 2004). Photographs by auto-photographers are equally capable of
17 stimulating negative emotional, visceral and sometimes violent reactions from their audience
18 as other photographs (Ewald, 2001). Prins (2011) discusses the way auto-photography
19 projects are susceptible to multiple gazes which influence representation through the pictures:
20 auto-photographers tend towards self-censorship under the impulse of the suspect gaze of
21 other community members, thereby internalizing community norms of privacy and
22 disclosure. Simultaneously, researchers setting up autophotography projects cannot avoid, as
23 an imagined audience, shaping participant photographers’ choices in subtle ways (Prins,
24 2011, 429).
25 Engaging audiences and subjects: photography as process 7
1 The critical commentaries to photography’s role in place-making point to the need to
2 understand the photograph as part of a process which does not stop at the moment of making
3 the picture. Making a picture is related to a wider process of communication and interaction,
4 not just between subject and photographer, but with a variety of audiences which stretches
5 the issue of representation in time and space. Kay (2011) emphasizes how politically engaged
6 photo-documentaries are about building solidarity with audiences, as much as with subjects.
7 As documentarians create calls to action, they need to recognize and engage those who are
8 called. Alredd (2006) discusses the tensions these double ‘solidarities’ give rise to, in
9 explaining how Wright’s early 20th century photo-documentaries should not be criticized for
10 their homogenizing representation of a presupposed ‘African American community’, but be
11 understood as a pedagogic engagement with a white audienceto confront it with the
12 ‘inadequacy of its historically conditioned gaze’ (Alredd, 2006, p. 554).
13 The emerging literature on curating as a pedagogy of the audience explicitly relates the
14 process to a politics of place. It focuses on the role of the curator of collaborative exhibitions
15 and site-specific art projects in mediating the tension between respecting the artist’s
16 autonomy and resisting an authoritative enforcement of essentialised understandings of place
17 (Bishop, 2006). Inspired by debates on the relational character of place-making in social and
18 cultural geography, Kwon (2002) calls for community-based art as a ‘projective’ rather than a
19 descriptive enterprise. Projects need to unsettle and raise questions, rather than provide
20 authoritative answers; the curator has an important responsibility in developing opportunities
21 for inspiring confrontations in and beyond the event-exhibition (Doherty, 2007). Such an
22 endeavor has a clear political dimension. For O’Neill and Wilson (2010) curatorship consists
23 of supporting emergent and unknown processes which are not linear, nor exhaustive, towards
24 the contesting of categories and resisting any seduction towards pre-defining the subject of
25 the process; the photograph becomes a moment captured in order to put forward alternative 8
1 representations, to open up hidden, misrepresented and underrepresented areas for
2 questioning. Photographic interventions are about considering your own place in relation to
3 the ‘given place’ in order to test who can and cannot speak (Kaizen (2010).
4 This emergent ‘social/relational turn’ in curatorship studies projects a different light to the
5 issue of representation through photography. It avoids the dichotomous view on dominant
6 versus subalterns representations in the photograph, and points to the process-character of
7 place-making in which a photograph becomes a moment of ‘projective’ intervention. In this
8 process, the character of the curator is put forward as a mediator between photographer,
9 subject and audience. However, where the literature on photography as representation
10 discusses in detail the specific strategic choices photographers are facing in relation to the
11 subject of representation, the literature on curatorship as place-making fails to discuss the
12 concrete strategic perspectives curators are to choose from to develop their engagements with
13 audiences into an emancipator endeavour. In the following paragraph, we discuss how Gert
14 Biesta’s political theory of public pedagogy can help dissecting the strategic potential and
15 problems of a process of ‘projective’ engagement with place between author/curator,
16 photographs, subject and audience..
17
18
19 Place-making as public pedagogy
20
21 To refine our understanding of the strategic and political dimensions of photographic place
22 making processes, we turn towards recent theories on public pedagogy. Public pedagogy
23 discusses photographic projects as pedagogic interventions in ongoing social learning process
24 of place making and takes the interaction process with the audience as the focus. In this
25 paper, we build upon Gert Biesta’s (2011) political theory of public pedagogy. Biesta 9
1 conceives politics as ‘...a process of transformation in which private interests are evaluated
2 and reformulated in light of collective needs and concerns.” (Biesta and Cowell 2012). This
3 involves the presentation of “...interests, sentiments, beliefs, values, principles, preferences,
4 ways of life, aspirations, aversions, and political identities, i.e., all the material that forms the
5 basis of public opinions” in the public sphere (Von Rautenfeld 2005: 187). In this
6 perspective, the politics of place making constitutes an arena of the public sphere in which
7 private conceptions of local identity and community are shared, discussed and translated into
8 collective imaginations. Public pedagogy considers these as learning processes and
9 emphasizes their potential in stimulating political and democratic awareness. Public
10 pedagogy in particular explores the possibilities for pedagogic interventions: attempts by
11 educators to shape or influence social interactions towards stimulating political social
12 learning.
13
14 Biesta (this issue) distinguishes three types of public pedagogic interventions in the political
15 process which have different intentions and effects: pedagogy for the public (instruction),
16 pedagogy of the public (conscientisation) and a pedagogy that opens up possibilities of
17 becoming public (interruption). Still very dominant in community-building, the first type of
18 pedagogy attempts to define and alter place identities by instructing participants into the
19 public debate about neglected issues or interests. The second type of public pedagogy, which
20 is strongly embedded in the Freirean tradition of community work, attempts to empower
21 marginalized groups by altering their self-conception as political subjects. This type of public
22 pedagogy frames place-making as a political process dominated by specific groups, and
23 emphasizes the need for marginalized groups to challenge their exclusion from the place-
24 making arena. The role of the public pedagogue is to facilitate the latter groups’
25 politicization, which takes the form of raising critical consciousness and developing counter- 10
1 hegemonic representations of place. The third type of pedagogy resists setting a pedagogic
2 agenda or predefining what needs to be ‘taught’. It has at its core a care for a relational form
3 of place-making that is characterised by plurality (Massey, 2004). This implies pedagogic
4 interventions which open up closed place-making processes, staging dissensus by interrupting
5 the normal order of places - without imposing alternative definitions of place. Rather,
6 interruptions enacted by public pedagogues enable new forms of political subjectivity and
7 imaginations of place and community to arise.
8
9
10
11 Lijn 3 and This Is Not Bonnybridge
12
13 Analyzing two different cases of photographic interventions, we will explore how
14 photography works as (part of) a pedagogic strategy. We will focus on how the community
15 educator uses photography to intervene with a particular pedagogical agenda in mind and
16 assess the potential of photography in the politics of place-making.
17 The Lijn 3 photo exhibition in the gentrifying neighbourhood Brugse Poort in Ghent,
18 Belgium, engaged professional photographers coming from outside the area. In the tradition
19 of photo-documentary, Lijn 3 reveals the social misery that continues to be present in the area
20 and incites to reflect on the dominant mantra on creative, middle class urbanization; rather
21 unexpectedly, it stirred a conflict over what is a representative and fair depiction of the
22 neighbourhood and enabled alternative processes of place-making to arise. In the second
23 case, an auto-photography exhibition in the post-industrial Scottish town of Bonnybridge, the
24 aim was to stimulate residents, ex-residents and non-residents of the village to photograph the 11
1 village and make their private concerns more public. The resulting images raised less of a
2 public debate but did stimulate more subtle learning processes amongst the participants.
3
4 The Lijn 3 photodocumentary
5 Brugse Poort is a post-industrial neighbourhood with a strong concentration of social and
6 spatial problems (lack of open space, substandard housing, poverty, drug use, illegal
7 immigrants, intercultural tensions) (Debruyne et al., 2008). In 2002, the Ghent city council
8 started a large-scale urban renewal project for the area dubbed ‘Oxygen for Brugse Poort’.
9 For a couple of years the council concentrated its financial resources and policy attention on
10 this neighbourhood to increase its liveability and attract middle class residents (Stad Gent,
11 2001, Stad Gent, 2007). The urban renewal project involved amongst others the building of
12 new parks and redesigning of existing public spaces, the development of a ‘soft mobility’
13 axis through the neighbourhood, the demolition and replacement of inadequate housing units
14 and a program to improve the access of migrant women to local social services. The council
15 deliberately applied a community-based planning approach by organising participatory
16 processes and strengthening and improving the networks between local organisations (Stad
17 Gent, 2009). By doing so, it aimed to turn around the existing representation of the
18 neighbourhood as a declining poor and migrant neighbourhood. A local socio-cultural
19 organisation called De Vieze Gasten (‘The Dirty Pals’) was given a crucial role in this
20 strategy. They were subsidised by the council to ‘assist’ (through theatre plays, a brass band,
21 story writing, processions, photography, etc.) residents in the change process brought about
22 by the urban renewal project. Important for our analysis is their photographic club called
23 Fixatiefi, which visually documented the life and changes in the neighbourhood.
24 12
1 In the first months of 2010, a social worker in the Brugse Poort neighbourhood organised an
2 exhibition, Lijn 3 (referring to the bus line passing through the neighbourhood), with
3 photographs revealing those living ‘at the margins of the welfare state’ (drug addicts, illegal
4 immigrants, poor housing conditions)(Beke, 2010). The social worker had felt increasingly
5 frustrated with the newly emerging hegemonic representation of the neighbourhood as
6 communicated through the urban renewal project. He believed that the new image of Brugse
7 Poort as a hot spot for the alternative and creative middle classes did not benefit his ‘clients’.
8 Quite to the contrary, his clients were ‘brushed away’ as they disturbed the new positive
9 image of the neighbourhood.
10 With the exhibition the social worker tried to stir a public debate about exclusion and
11 marginalization in our cities and the failure of urban renewal to address these issues. The area
12 he was working exemplified this failure in a very concrete manner. He and the organisation
13 he worked for believe in the power of concrete, real life stories to raise awareness amongst,
14 but also emotionally touch the general public and policy makers. Inspired by the socially
15 critical photo-documentaries of the early 20th century social work pioneers (Huff 1998;
16 Rosler 1989; Finnegan 2010), he decided to organise a photo-exhibition on the marginalised
17 lives he knew from the neighbourhood. He made two important strategic decisions which
18 influenced the effects of his intervention. First, he declined the offer of the local amateur
19 photographers of Fixatief to participate. He believed their images would be too positive (in
20 line with the hegemonic images of the neighbourhood projected through the urban renewal
21 project) and would risk ignoring the problems he wanted to show. Secondly, the photo
22 exhibition was to have an audience way beyond the neighbourhood. Therefore, the exhibition
23 was to be held in a professional exhibition venue, in the city centre, and an editor was sought
24 to publish an attractive exhibition catalogue. In addition, collaboration was sought with
25 professional photographers with a certain fame and some distance to the area. The social 13
1 worker contacted six professional photographers whom he accompanied to the
2 neighbourhood and whom he introduced to the people and issues to be revealed.
3
4 The pictures produced, while overall expressing a degree of ‘artistic’ aestheticism, reveal a
5 mixture of styles and approaches. Some photographers explicitly zoom in on details of social
6 misery (e.g. close-ups of drug injections, of rubbish heaps in squats, of the extremely bad
7 housing conditions of undocumented Roma migrants), while others tried to emphasize the
8 ‘normality’ of marginalised groups by depicting scenes of everyday life (kids playing in a
9 muddy street, friends in a pub, construction workers praying at the work site). Finally, some
10 opted for a more humorous approach by including bizarre or carnivalesque elements in their
11 pictures (a beat cop imitating Elvis, a drunk guy in the pub offering a beer to the tattooed
12 skull on his chest, ‘‘retro’ statuettes on a chimney).
13 The photographic exhibition triggered two types of responses from the audienceii. The
14 majority of the visitors of the exhibition applauded the exhibition, highlighting that through
15 the photographs they have seen a glimpse of ‘another community’ which they were not aware
16 of, which appears to be a fulfilment of the organizers’ purpose. However, a vociferous
17 minority responded indignantly. Many of these explicitly identified themselves as being from
18 the neighbourhood, while almost none of the people that responded positively to the
19 exhibition identified where they were from, except for some that said that ‘they once lived
20 there’. Those that responded negatively to the exhibition claimed that the neighbourhood was
21 represented in a one-sided and sensationalist way, ignoring all the good things and initiatives
22 set up over the course of the last years. A wide array of neighbourhood associations
23 responded promptly with an open letter, denouncing the lack of broader context. The social
24 worker himself was shocked by these responses. While he had hoped to receive support from
25 within the neighbourhood against expected negative reactions by city officials, the exhibition 14
1 had laid bare strong tensions within the neighbourhood. According to him, the reactions also
2 adversely affected the marginalized individuals he had attempted to give a voice. The social
3 worker claimed that most of his photographed clients were initially happy with the exhibition,
4 as they felt the photographs portrayed the neighbourhood as they know and experience it.
5 However, the negative responses from the middle class sections of the neighbourhood,
6 claiming that it was unfair to identify the neighbourhood solely with its most marginalized
7 residents, reinforced stereotypes and feelings of stigmatization with his clients. The polarized
8 debate (rather than the exhibition itself) made them feel betrayed and exposed. Disappointed
9 by the adverse reactions, the social worker refused to further engage in the debate he had
10 triggered.
11
12 From a public pedagogy perspective, the story of Lijn3 can be dissected at the double level of
13 intentions and effects. The Lijn 3 exhibition combined an intention to ‘instruct’ the general
14 public about the conditions of life at the margins of the welfare state (‘pedagogy for the
15 public’) with an ambition to undermine hegemonic representations of place. The latter was
16 pursued through a strategy which combined –rather uneasily as its effects showed- the aim of
17 generating a broader critical awareness of the processes of exclusion implied in the urban
18 renewal in order to stimulate political action to make urban renewal processes more inclusive
19 (‘pedagogy of the public’) with an attempt at interrupting the on-going processes of place-
20 making by giving marginalized inhabitants of the neighbourhood, their experiences and needs
21 a public character (‘pedagogy for publicness’). From the ‘pedagogy for the public’
22 perspective, the effects of the photo exhibition were mixed. Most visitors found the
23 photographs instructive as they learned about a part of the community and place which they
24 were not aware of, and the reactions showed some were also emotionally touched. The
25 representations exposed the minute detail of everyday life struggles within a single 15
1 photograph, layers normally invisible to those who are not inside these ethnic or social
2 groupings.
3 For a part of the audience however, this pedagogy for the public did not reach its goal and
4 rather triggered aversion and rejection. This can be related to the way the exhibition also had
5 an intention to interrupt, an intention which materialized to an extent unexpected by the
6 organiser. The social worker used the medium of photography as a way to generate images of
7 people, events and spaces he considered were ignored, unknown and that he felt merited
8 bringing to public consciousness. However, he underestimated the extent to which the
9 dominant image of a creative middle class neighbourhood had already become pervasive. At
10 the scale of the neighbourhood, the images he attempted to give more prominence were
11 interrupting the image of ‘normality’. The interruption it caused opened up a debate on
12 whether the photographs gave a fair and balanced representation of the neighbourhood and in
13 that sense also questioned the hitherto hegemonic representation of the neighbourhood.
14 Ironically, this debate strengthened hegemonic representations of the neighbourhood as the
15 pre-dominant response of local residents focused on rejecting the one-sided representation of
16 the neighbourhood and emphasized the marginal nature of the people and practices portrayed
17 in the photographs. This response inhibited the development of political subjectivity (‘a
18 becoming public’) amongst the marginalized residents depicted in the photographs, as it
19 increased their feelings of stigmatization and exclusion. Furthermore, the debate deflected
20 from the exhibition’s ‘pedagogy for and of the public’ intentions, as it did not stimulate
21 politicians and local organisations to move to action to deal with the problems depicted, and
22 refrained the ‘dominant community’ of local residents from widening their knowledge and
23 understanding of the marginalized and excluded inhabitants in their neighbourhoodiii.
24
25 16
1 Autophotography: This Is Not Bonnybridge, Scotland
2
3 Bonnybridge is a ‘post-industrial’ semi-rural village in Central Scotland. It has experienced
4 significant decline of its major industries in the 1980s, leaving behind vast derelict industrial
5 areas and an extensive but underused canal and railway system. None of the derelict
6 industrial areas have been subjected to government-based regeneration or fenced off from
7 access, leaving the landscape a mix of picturesque countryside and vast tracts of derelict and
8 dangerous industrial sites and mines. Specific policies and statistics represent the area as in
9 need of regeneration and with severe social problems (Falkirk Council 2010; 2011).
10 However, in the past decades, the area has also attracted a wealthier class to large newly
11 constructed private housing estates. Consequently, a section of the town lost its regeneration
12 status and access to certain public funding streams that might have helped to alleviate some
13 of its structural problems. Therefore little concerted regeneration takes place; on the
14 contrary, over time around ten of the town’s public buildings, as indoor meeting spaces, had
15 been demolished, replaced by one community centre that predominantly functions as a sports
16 and youth centre. As in Brugse Poort, the new middle classes inhabiting the new housing
17 estates dominate the limited public meetings and participation initiatives which do take place.
18 Older residents seem to have lost the capacity and interest to voice concerns over the
19 transformation of the area, due to a lack of opportunities available to do so. One of the
20 authors, who works as a community worker with the original and predominantly older-aged
21 residents, questioned why their voices are missing and searched for interventions that might
22 help them ‘to become public’ again.
23
24 Autophotography was chosen as a pedagogic tool to stimulate the development of political
25 subjectivity and engagement amongst this underrepresented group, and to open up a public 17
1 debate about the future of the community. Different from the Brugsepoort, the community
2 worker had no intention to put forward a certain message through the pictures. In auto-
3 photography the researcher or community worker is less prominent in the production of
4 pictures, and is relegated to an outsider of the resident’s world depicted in the image. Rather
5 than the content of the pictures, the photographic practice itself becomes the tool for
6 stimulating a democratization of place-making in the village.
7
8 The autophotography project set off with a public call to residents to reflect upon
9 Bonnybridge in its transitory state. An advert was placed in the local newspaper for
10 contributions as well as advertised amongst local camera clubs, in the public library, around
11 the village itself and to individuals who were known to the community worker through earlier
12 community work. Cameras were offered if necessary. Eleven photographers from a variety of
13 social backgrounds and neighbourhoods contributed to the exhibition. Only a few individuals
14 had any particular experience in photography. To give residents free reign in what to
15 photograph, participants were instructed in rather general terms to take photographs of
16 Bonnybridge in its ‘transitory state’. Different from Brugsepoort, the audience of the
17 exhibition was chosen to be decisively local. Bonnybridge-library, one of the few remaining
18 public venues and hub of local social life, agreed to display the photographs.
19 Many pictures expressed the photographers’ relationships to the hidden, unseen and unknown
20 aspects of the place and the way they lived its history. Both negative and positive
21 perspectives alternated. Negative themes included representations of the temporary closure of
22 the local community centre, littering, civil disobedience, derelict and abandoned industrial
23 areas, lack of understanding of the area’s important industrial historical past. Positive themes
24 included relaxing walking areas, beautiful touristic spots, areas of historical significance,
25 places of their childhood. Photographer-participants were eager for their photographs to 18
1 stimulate debates and connections with others living in the area on the issues of loss, decline
2 and neglect, and indeed beauty, pride and aesthetics as raised within their photographs.
3 Different from the more ‘artistic’ pictures in Lijn 3, these messages were expressed in a more
4 one-dimensional and traditional way, extra elements added to the picture to make the
5 message more explicit. For example, several photographers made their images into a collage
6 involving text, to tell a story or put a political point across where they thought photography
7 was not able to. Photographs were manipulated to communicate a particular message, with
8 the use of sepia and black and white, frames around the images or blurred romantic edges to
9 add to the understanding of these photographs, and the places depicted in them, as historically
10 significant to the photographeriv.
11 We interviewed the contributors to the exhibition and all highlighted a range of reasons for
12 contributing which show their own pedagogies of instruction and conscientisation: a desire to
13 communicate to others their anger and sadness at the decline and neglect of specific parts of
14 the village; to show an alternative side of the village based on their personal positive
15 experiences contemporarily in walking around its beauty spots; historically as a place of their
16 happy childhoods. All were eager to start a more general debate about Bonnybridge at the
17 scale of the community, but felt that their photographs did not make this happen within this
18 exhibition, which they were disappointed about. Indeed the exhibition did not create a major
19 stir in the wider community and wasn’t taken up by the media as was the case with Lijn 3. At
20 the scale of the community, it did not have the interrupting effect that could stimulate a
21 renewed publicness of place-making. Nonetheless, it did open up a space for political
22 engagement in place-making at the level of transactions between the photographers and
23 viewers of the exhibition. At the interpersonal scale, the project did involve a public
24 pedagogy which cares for and stimulates publicness. The images submitted began a
25 conversation around hidden or symbolic spaces and everyday experiences that were hitherto 19
1 unseen. Some of the images could not be recognised even by some of those living in that
2 location for a long period of time and by the other contributing photographers, encouraging
3 them therefore to see previously familiar places in a strange way. The exhibition and the
4 discussions between photographers and viewers which unravelled constituted a translation
5 process from private image to public image. For the viewer and their fellow photographers,
6 seeing the place through the lens of the other was an interrupting experience, allowing for
7 new conceptions of the place to emerge and for historical places to be brought back into
8 presence. The photographers revisited particular places in the act of putting forward their
9 own agenda for encouraging ‘seeing’, the viewer and fellow photographers engaging in
10 looking at the visual depictions and considering their own experiences and understandings of
11 the village in a different way.
12 Secondly, the exhibition had the unexpected effect of conscientisation or a ‘pedagogy of the
13 public’ for the participants, as photographers themselves emerged as more confident political
14 subjects out of this experience. Before the start of the project, two photographers remarked
15 that they were not the correct social class to be taking photographs; as working class males
16 their role was not to do artistic things. In the course of the project, participants became more
17 convinced about their political capacities and about the potential of photography to change
18 something in the community, which is a necessary part of the political agency they gained
19 through the project. The act of taking the photographs allowed each participant to put forward
20 how their place looks to them, developing their own place and themselves within this. It
21 became a process of political subjectification, a way for them to gain political agency, assert
22 their own ways of ‘seeing’ and experiencing their community, and test their own
23 representations and experiences in the public domain with other residents with different
24 representations and positionalities (see Biesta 2011). Illustrative of their regained political
25 confidence, the photographers themselves initiated a second photography project to explore 20
1 and raise awareness of the poorly equipped shopping streets of Bonnybridge, and the people
2 who actually live and shop there.
3
4
5
6 Conclusions
7 In this paper we have discussed the use of photographic interventions in place-making
8 processes by two community workers in Belgium and Scotland. The cases reveal the
9 relevance of considering photographic interventions in place-making as ‘public pedagogy
10 projects’ and reveal the ways community workers as ‘curators’ become co-producers of
11 meaning in collaborating with the producers of political art ( experiences, perceptions and
12 representations reframed in a photograph), towards setting out pedagogic engagements
13 between viewers,producers and subjects of photographic projects.
14 Discussing these interventions from a public pedagogy perspective reveals the complexities
15 of relational place-making and shows that there is more strategic decisions to be made than
16 choosing between defending the position of dominant or marginalized groups. A public
17 pedagogy perspective reveals how the same goal of democratizing place-making can be
18 pursued from a variety of strategic perspectives, and that depending on these perspectives, we
19 can engage in a pedagogy for the public, a pedagogy of the public or a pedagogy for
20 publicness. Depending on this choice, photography can be deployed as a pedagogical
21 instrument for instructing the general public and policy makers on neglected images of place
22 (as in the photo-documentary tradition exemplified by the Lijn3 case), for conscientisation
23 and stimulating political agency of marginalized groups in the making of place (as in many
24 Photovoice projects) or for interrupting normality to open up the public sphere to alternative
25 perspectives on place (as was the intention in the auto-photography project of Bonnybridge). 21
1 However, our case studies also reveal that photographic projects are complex processes
2 which tend to create unpredictable effects in relation to the perspectives and motivations of
3 the ‘curator’. In our analysis, we have begun to unravel the complexity of place-making-
4 through-photography in four dimensions.
5 Firstly, it has become clear that the intentions of the curator-community worker do not
6 always align with the intentions of the participating photographers. Photographers can add
7 additional layers of motivation to the project, which can conflict with or support the curators’
8 intentions.
9 Secondly, this impacts upon the content communicated through the picture, and the form of
10 the picture. Whereas the community worker in Ghent kept a relatively close eye on the
11 content of the pictures, it is clear that even there, the photographers skilfully tried to
12 emphasize their own particular interests as revealed in the personal ‘artistictouch’ each
13 picture transpires. In the case of Bonnybridge, the community worker did not put any
14 constraints on the content or form of the pictures and left this crucial communicative element
15 to the participants to decide. The interactive ambitions of the Bonnybridge photographers
16 have certainly had an impact upon the fact that their pictures portray personal, individual
17 stories, whereas the Lijn 3 pictures reveal an attempt to express the ‘exemplary’ in the first
18 place.
19
20 A third element which remained out of control to the organizers of the interventions were the
21 interpretations made by its viewers. The cases have made clear to what extent interpretation
22 is an uncontrollable element. At the moment of interpretation, the content of the picture
23 connects to place-elements already existing in the minds of the viewers. In Lijn3, the content
24 of the photographs clashed with the image of the neighbourhood pre-existing in the minds of
25 a number of middle class residents, and the ‘exemplary’ has been read as caricaturing. This 22
1 unexpectedly incited a certain ‘pedagogy for publicness’ which opened up a debate on the
2 ‘true image’ of the neighbourhood. At the same time, the debate inhibited a ‘pedagogy of the
3 public’ which might have offered the marginalised groups characterized on the pictures a
4 greater degree of political self-consciousness.
5
6 Finally, the interpretation of pictures also interacts with the context in which the picture is
7 framed. Contextuality goes beyond the kind of intertextuality with existing place-frames as
8 described in the previous point. Rather, it also refers to the scale and place it aims for in its
9 place-making attempts, and the scale and place at which viewers reflect upon the pictures. In
10 both cases, different parties involved were referring to different scales and places. The
11 community worker in Lijn 3 wanted to make a general statement about urban renewal in
12 deprived neighbourhoods in Belgium, therefore deliberately choosing for famous Belgian
13 photographers to make ‘exemplary’ portraits and a major, central city exhibition venue to
14 show the pictures. However, the content of the pictures, the name of the exhibition and the
15 way it was interpreted by Brugsepoort-residents as caricaturing this particular neighbourhood
16 relegated the ensuing debate to the neighbourhood scale, thereby altering the subject of
17 debate and the public pedagogy of the project in a direction the organizer didn’t want it to go.
18 Alternatively, in Bonnybridge, the organizer and participants had hoped to start a debate at
19 the municipal level by inviting photographers from various backgrounds and hosting the
20 exhibition at the local library. Again, the pedagogy of the project shifted in unexpected
21 directions as the ‘pedagogy for publicness’ remained at the interpersonal level predominantly
22 and an unexpected ‘pedagogy of the public’ developed as photographers developed
23 themselves into more self-conscious political actors.
24 23
1 In sum, our exploratory analysis of the public pedagogies of photographic interventions in
2 place making has revealed a complexity of processes to be explored and theorized in further
3 detail. Biesta’s theory of public pedagogy enables a more nuanced understanding of such
4 community building attempts, showing how various intentions and effects can be attached to
5 attempts at democratizing place-making, which merit further research.
6 Our analysis not only dissects photographic interventions as sets of different, but
7 interconnected pedagogies, but also reveals some strategic issues ‘curators’ of photographic
8 place-making interventions should take into account. First of all, we have revealed the
9 necessity for continuous reflexivity and flexibility as curating means, in essence, managing
10 an inherently unpredictable and complex set of processes which cannot be planned
11 beforehand. Secondly, part of the unpredictability can be decreased by taking into account the
12 potential divergences and uncontrollable elements we distinguished. Both intentions of other
13 collaborators and existing place frames of audiences have been shown to influence the
14 content of what is communicated. Being aware of and open to the multiplicity of intentions
15 collaborators hold, and discussing these beforehand and along the way decreases the
16 unpredictability from the side of collaborators; continuous analysis and reflection upon the
17 place-frames held with intended audiences will increase understanding on how they interact
18 with content purveyed.
19 Finally, curators of site-specific interventions need to take into account the relational
20 character of places in thinking on the context in which they frame their interventions.
21
22
23
24
25 24
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6 1 i See the following weblink for a selection of photographs of daily life in the neighbourhood made by Fixatief: 2 http://www.fixatief.be/pdf/BOEK_BP_gefixeerd.pdf [last consulted on 19 february 2012] 3 ii We analysed the responses to this photographic exhibition by looking at the guest book of the exhibition, newspaper 4 clippings, open letters and the local blogging site Gentblogt.be. We also interviewed several key players in the 5 neighbourhood. 6 iii We are only considering the immediate responses to the photo exhibition here, as a couple of months later, partially 7 after discussions with external actors (amongst which one of the authors), a range of local organizations organized a 8 reflection process (entitled ‘Precaire Puzzel’ or ‘Precarious Puzzle’) and set up a campaign for a ‘solidarity 9 neighbourhood’. 10 iv Pictures and some more detail on the exhibition is given on http://thisisnotbonnybridge.blogspot.com/ (last consulted 11 on 19 february 2012)