For this blog post on Lincoln Clarkes Heroines I would like to start off with a quote a Los Angels Times staff writer who described Clarkes work as “photographs that speak about obsession – a young woman’s fatal fixation with drugs, a photographer’s addiction to capturing her crumbling beauty, and a predator’s sick need to take her life” (Ugor).

The photos can intense at times, so if you open the slideshows in the link above, know that something may sit in the pit of your stomach for a few hours (if reading Missing Sarah hasn’t already done that to you).  It may come back whenever you have to go through the DTES, and you may feel differently when you walk by and see people shaking violently, strung on methadone, or when you drive by and see a young woman standing on street corner in vacant, industrial setting.

The sentiment may shift from pity, maybe to empathy, or moral outrage.  For Clarkes his response was obsession.  Between 1997 and 2001, Clarkes took hundreds of photographs.  In 2002 his book was published by Anvil Press and won both national and international acclaim (link to publishers site).  Five of the women photographed by Clarkes either went missing or were found on Pickton’s farm (The Huffington Post).  When asked why he only concentrated only on women, he responded “I approach it like Titanic going down: women and children first.  I don’t have enough life boats” (Ugor).

I see the above quote as a deeply ambivalent statement given the complexities of revealing the bodies, faces, lives, and stories of highly marginalized subjects.  Was his photography really a “lifeboat” for these women? Or did he use them as a lifeboat, exploiting them to further his career? According to Paul Ugor:

“Debates about the exploitation of the female subjects of Clarkes’ photos centre are around the women’s consent to their images being taken, the amount paid to them, their awareness of the extent of the circulation of the images, and the general social value of the project.”  If the women “do understand the terms of their consent” as some have insisted, “then questions still arise about who owns the images thereafter” (Ugor).

I was surprised to hear that compensation these women received from Clarkes was very basic.  “He paid them with cigarettes, biscuits” and other immediate comforts (Ugor).  He also agreed to keep their anonymity as long as they were still alive (Sayej).

It’s impossible to say the project did nothing to help increase awareness and dialogue about the larger issues that surround these women’s lives, because it did.  Others will stand firm in their position however, that eliminating the possibility of exploiting these subjects when they live in “such dire circumstances at the very margins of society” is next to impossible (Ugor). On the flip side again, the visual representation of Clarkes Heroines “transmutes” these photographs from “innocuous entertainment pieces to lethal political weapons wielded for a social debate or argument” (Ugor).  In the portraits where “the dents we see in the physical bodies and social spaces of the pictures” the photographs “act as visual testimonies…evidence of endured pain and torture” and “point to distortions in the larger scheme of things in a society that prides itself…for social welfarism and social equity” (Ugor).

Do you believe that the “social usefulness” of the project was enough to mitigate the harm done representing these women in the deeply vulnerable moments of their lives?  Is any type of exposure better than invisibility?  Does the circulation of these images perpetuate a degrading collective identity for these women?

Works Cited

 N.a.  “Lincoln Clarkes’ ‘Heroines’ On Display At Vancouver Museum.”  The Huffington Post 27 Nov. 2013: n.p.  Web.

<http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/27/lincoln-clarkes-heroines-vancouver_n_4351448.html>

Sayej, Nadja. “Lincoln Clarke’s Vintage Photographs of Vancouver’s Female Addicts Are Incredible” Vice.  20 Nov. 2013.  Web.  10 Oct. 2013.

<http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/lincoln-clarkes-series-about-addicted-vancouver-women-is-still-amazing>

Ugor, Paul.  “Heroines Essay – Imagining the Invisible, Naming Suffering – Lincoln Clarkes Photography, and the Women of Downtown Eastside Vancouver” West Coast Line 53, Simon Fraser University (2007) n.p.  Web. 10 Oct. 2014.

<http://worldwidegreeneyes.com/heriones-essay/>

In The World Is Moving Around Me, Daniel Laferrier uses culture as a reference point throughout his memoir as he navigates the wreckage and tragedy in Haiti after the Earthquake.  Culture frames the memoir from its beginning, as a literary festival sets the backdrop of the book, both in the first vignette and the memoir’s foreword.  Significantly, Michaelle Jean makes a direct reference to the chapter titled Culture, as to “what the value of culture is, when faced with such suffering. ‘When everything else collapses, culture remains’ In Haiti, nothing is truer” (11).  Despite the country’s struggles over “natural and man made misfortunes” (Ousselin), the Haitian people have maintained a rich cultural history: “people are still looking for the reason behind the high concentration of artists in such a small space (14).

In fact, Laferrier boldly states that: “Culture is the only thing that can stand up to the earthquake” (288).  At least, this is his offering of hope in the chaos his beloved country has been thrown into. However, one Haitian cultural heritage site, a family burial ground where many ancestors (and several of the country’s artists) are buried, was a place that was not as effected by the Earthquake as other parts of the country were.  In the town of Petionville, outside of and overlooking Port-au-Prince, this burial ground “was crowded with brightly painted mausoleums decked out with metal flower wreaths,” where “a cross to Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of death, stood in a corner where people would bring him coffee and cigarettes in exchange for a favor” (Stebler).

This site of cultural, ancestral importance that overlooked the shattered Port-au-Prince was demolished only five months after the earthquake in order to make a way for a paved, concrete bus station.  On location, Stebler states “people were at a loss as to how to stop the demolition, if they even knew about it. Some Friends and I went up onto the rubble to look for small remnants of this sacred place….We photographed anything that might bear witness: tiny things, tragic things, bones, clothing, a shoe, part of a coffin were strewed in with the overwhelming rubble.”  One resident, who was notified about the demolition before most of the graveyard was gone, “rushed to the cemetery and retrieved the bones of her brother Stivenson Maglorie, and her mother Louisiana St. Flourant, the god-mother of the Saint-Soleil movement in Haitian Art” (Stebler).

The photographs are evocative and “stand as evidence of what has gone wrong and stand as indictments of a grim declaration that dismisses the history and culture of an already-beleaguered Haitian people” (Stebler).  For myself, the photographs are similar to the style of Laferriere’s writing; picking up the bits and pieces of what remains, and trying process reality after-the-fact.  This is also a testament to something quite sad, that the municipal government of this town would act in such a disrespectful manner, insensitive of the residents’ need to preserve their culture in the face of “natural and man-made misfortunes.”

Ousselin, Edward. “The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake by Dany Laferrière.” World Literature Today. University of Oklahoma, May 2013. Online.

<http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/may/world-moving-around-me-memoir-haiti-earthquake-dany-laferriere#.VFxqYGK9KSP>

Steber, Maggie. “A Second Death in a Haitian Cemetery.”  Lens: Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism.  The New York Times, 18 May 2010. Online.

<http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/showcase-163/?_r=0>