I want to start by acknowledging how frustrating the practice of photography can be for someone who is at once a photographer and a cultural critic. In the wake of a good deal of postcolonial criticism of photography, photographic practice would appear to be well-near impossible. Photography is without remorse--hopeless, as it were--always already reproducing the colonialist's gaze, always already guaranteeing a differential in power. This vision is quite disconcerting indeed. Photography here is imagined as a fixed and static practice, affording little or no room for mobility. This essay seeks a recovery of possibility--a joyful, affirmative, even optimistic photographic practice--in the wake of what appears to be guaranteed hopelessness adrift in a sea full of hackneyed "always alreadys".

Critics including Susan Sontag, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, bell hooks and others focus their discussions on the practices of identity formation manifest, as they see it, in photography. Photography, they contend, is a medium through which Hegel's dialectics of identity formation, outlined in The Phenomenology of Spirit, can be realized.

   
Here I situate my remarks and critique to suggest that we only know half of the story when we conceive photography in this way--that is to say, as a functionalist mechanism for (presumably Western) identity formation. In other words, to borrow and bend from Spinoza, we know little of what photography can do when we take into account only its ability to signify or to re/present the "Other" to the "colonialist's" gaze. This kind of critical practice encourages us to lose sight of the fact that photography possesses the ability to affect us in ways that are not necessarily signifying.

Susan Sontag, for her part, argues that "[t]o take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged" (12). She sees photography--the act of photographing, those involved in making the photo, the photo print and the print spectator--as fixed and arrested in stasis rather than as a dynamic and fluid practice potentially producing positive e/affects. More crucially, the moment the photographer first recognizes h/is "object" would seem to be for Sontag what sets into motion photography's arguably retrograde ethics (this moment would appear analogous to

 
e x t i m a c y

 
1 of 12