Public Parking
A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Propertyless Subjects
Friday, July 29, 2022 | Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe
Photography is a politically efficacious technology with the potential to enable those who are socially and economically excluded to preserve ordinary moments of life. Describing this belief, [Terry] Dennett is quoted as saying, “Photographs are documents we can make ourselves, documents we can have some control over with regard to distribution. Also important in this respect are the ephemeral materials of everyday life, the redundancy notices and tax demands etc. Such material constitutes a vivid historical counter-archive, for it often contains photographic images made outside the sanction of officialdom and of events censored from the press, and, perhaps more importantly, shows things so ordinary and everyday, or so unique, that no one else has recorded them.” For Dennett, representation is not a fixed category or an image but a process via which one realises one's own capacity as a social being.