The Responsibility of Looking

The Responsibility of Looking

Kerri Schlottman

The first time I saw Mary Ellen Mark’s famous 1990 photograph Amanda and her Cousin Amy, I was immediately drawn to it. Somewhere in the photo albums at my mom’s house in Southeast Detroit there was a similar photo of my sister and I, equally defiant though less provocative. In Mark’s photograph, nine-year-old Amanda stands in a kiddie pool, hip cocked with a lit cigarette in her fingers. Her nails are fake. Her face has the remnants of eyeliner and mascara. Her cousin Amy sits in the shallow water, a slightly bewildered, perhaps more vulnerable subject in the photo. The setting is rural North Carolina, but the scene could be any working class community. Mark had been sent by Life Magazine to document youth in a special school for troubled children, which is where she met Amanda. 

For years after studying the photograph, I wondered about its subjects. What had happened to them? Were they okay? When Mark passed away in 2015, NPR found Amanda, who was then in her late thirties. The interviewer asked her why she let Mark take her photograph. Amanda’s reply was that she thought someone would see the photos and it would be a way out of her challenging circumstances. Unfortunately, that was not the outcome for her nor for many subjects of this type of work. 

The potential power of social documentary photography is the way it can tell a story in a scene because it documents real people in real situations. However, it also has the ability to inadvertently objectify its subjects just as easily. This, along with the NPR interview, inspired my novel Tell Me One Thing. The segment raised many questions for me about the responsibility of looking – of my own complicity in doing so, of Mark’s in taking the photograph, and of the art world’s in making it iconic. My novel follows a New York City photographer whose career is launched after capturing a photograph of a young girl smoking a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker outside of a rural Pennsylvania motel, and the parallel story of the girl’s challenging life. It’s an attempt, however fictional, to give a voice to the subject. 

The issue that emerged most prominently for me upon hearing the NPR interview is the tension between seeing something and actually caring about it. This might be the result of where people tend to encounter this type of work, which is on the walls in a museum or gallery. If you study contemporary art history, like I did, you’ll inevitably learn about Dorothea Lange who was a Depression-era documentary photographer commissioned by the government to document the plight of migrant workers in the United States. Her photos were critical in helping FDR make a winning case for increased funding for social services. Despite the fact that Lange cared less about her work being seen as art and more about its potential to enact social change, her photographs are now found in most major museum collections. This unwittingly reduces the powerful origins of such photography. There is something about the removal of it as a tool for social commentary that opens it up for objectification.

There are many photographers who have contributed to a building era of social documentary photography meant to shed light on our shared humanity. Outside of Lange’s work, the extent to which these endeavors have been successful is debatable and, unfortunately, in most cases untrackable. How the subjects are cast in such contexts has been a point of discussion for decades and not just in the arena of artistic production but within the field of photojournalism as well. These bodies of work beg the question: What responsibility does the photographer assume in taking such photos? What responsibility does the photographer have to their subjects? It could be that the answer is none. That, if there is responsibility to be had, it’s on behalf of the viewer who is the consumer of the content. But that’s an easy way out of the complex relationship between artist and subject. A sense of responsibility might be an expectation of the subjects themselves, as we saw with Amanda in Mary Ellen Mark’s work. 

In recent years there has been a rise in socially engaged art, which centers actionable social change as part of the artist’s practice. Within this context, there is an emergence of social documentary photography that comes from within the community being documented and is generated through long-term engagement with the subjects (noting that Mark did in other projects follow her subjects for long lengths of time, getting to know them intimately). A compelling example is award-winning photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally, who has been called the Dorothea Lange of our time. Kenneally has generated an impressive body of work titled Upstate Girls, which chronicles three struggling generations in her hometown of Troy, New York. Kenneally approaches the project with incredible sensitivity. More than a body of photography, she has mentored some of her subjects, published a book about the project, and has hosted workshops in Troy to help young people explore their creativity. 

That’s not to say that it is necessary, possible, or even appropriate for all artists to become so involved with their subjects. But it is possible to feel the difference in a project like Upstate Girls compared to other examples of social documentary photography. There is something about Kenneally’s work that asks the viewer to listen as well as look. This was a goal for me in writing Tell Me One Thing as well, although it’s arguably easier to achieve in text than image, and even more so when writing fiction.

Still, I wanted to avoid the traps of objectification, particularly as I explored the very edges of it. Coming from a setting not dissimilar to that of my young subject allowed me to approach the storyline with genuine care. Having moved away from that environment as a young adult to live in New York City enabled me to needle into aspects of privilege. The novel straddles two worlds with my hope that it sheds light on the motivations and actions of people on both sides.

In this current world of social media and endless content, we are constantly bombarded with images and videos. There have been numerous studies on how visual culture is desensitizing us, how it’s changing us as a society, and what it takes, under these conditions, to make a person care. Social documentary photography has the power to slow us down, invite us to learn, to listen. Similar to a strong work of literature, these powerful projects ask us to stop for a moment and connect with the empathy we so often lack for people unlike ourselves.
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Kerri Schlottman is the author of Tell Me One Thing, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on January 31, 2023. For over twenty years, she has worked to support artists, writers, and performers in creating new work. Her writing won second place in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, was longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize semi-finalist. Kerri grew up in Southeast Detroit and has lived in the New York City area since 2005. 

 

TELL ME ONE THING

Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled “Lulu & the Trucker,” launches Quinn’s career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother’s prostitution.

Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and “Lulu & the Trucker” has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn’t you help me all those years ago? Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City’s free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.

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Category: On Writing