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The Women of the Downtown Eastside as Seen Through the Lens of Photographer Lincoln Clarkes

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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/>

Cultural Preservation after the Earthquake

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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.”
Laferriere, Dany. Trans. Homel, David. The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haitian Earthquake. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013. Ebook.
NB: Page numbers to Laferriere’s text will be slightly different because of the text’s medium of publication
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.
Steber, Maggie. “A Second Death in a Haitian Cemetery.”  Lens: Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism.  The New York Times, 18 May 2010. Online.

 

Revisionist History and Cantonese Opera troupes in BC

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Hi, and welcome back! For this weeks post on topics in life narratives I would like to start off with something that we talked about in class on Tuesday.  

To recap our discussions from 130-131 of “Diamond Grill,” we spoke about the ways in which Fred Wah challenges some of the dominant historical narratives that Canadian national identity is made up of.  Chinese-Canadians’ role in building the CPR is just one (of sadly many) examples demonstrating how Canada developed as a nation through the exploitation of its migrant work force, along with its racially selective and prejudiced immigration practices. And so, if Canadian national identity is composed of dominant historical narratives, then that normative Canadian identity has been simultaneously  formed through the exclusion of multiple other narratives, from “othered” subjects who’s stories were not seen as worth preserving or publicly celebrating. To counter these historical narratives in/formed by racial prejudice, it becomes imparitive to tell these other stories; or rather, to uncover the alternative histories and narratives that are more truthful to the experiences and composition of what British Columbia was and is.

We can see this impulse at work in other Chinese-Canadian authors like Paul Yee.  His play “Jade in the Coal” produced at UBC in parternship with Pangaea arts society in 2010, focused on a small mining community in Cumberland BC which, during the 19th century, had the second largest Chinese community in North America. It was a large enough community to have an opera house with a capacity of 400 which hosted these and other touring opera troupes from 1880’s to the 1920’s.  The focus of Yee’s play was the interaction between this community and the Opera troupe. This story was interesting in and of itself, but what I found even more fascinating was that this story was not an isolated incident.

This aspect of Canadian History is taken up by Wing Chung Ng, a scholar who wrote his thesis on the social history of Cantonese Opera, in China “and among the Chinese in disporia” during the late 19th early 20th century (26). In his article “Chinatown Theatre as Transnational Buisness” Ng focus on the business that developed out of recruiting Cantonese Opera troupes to perform in Vancouver, where these tropes travelled to Chinatown’s in San Fransisco and New York (29).  This business was inevitably a demanding one that was lead and financed by Vancouver’s “merchant elite” (33).

I would love nothing more than to dive into this article and this aspect of our history more thoroughly, but to conclude I will quote Ng’s introductory note that, “Despite the Cantonese opera’s once commanding popularity as a favourite entertainment for Chinatown residents, the subject continues to elude in-depth historical analysis” (26).  Though the work of Wing Chung Ng and Paul Yee differ in their forms, I believe they are both guided by this revisionist impulse to tell the stories of the Chinese-Canadian immigrant experience that, in these instances, have to do with a remarkable cultural history.

 

Ng, Wing Chung.  “Chinatown Theatre as Transnational Business: New Evidence from Vancouver during the Exclusion Era” BC Studies 148 2005/6: 25-54.

Genre theory, Media theory and life narratives

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Hello, and welcome to the first of a series of posts around topics in life narratives. For this week I’d like to start by saying my ideas came from a note in “Genre as Social Action” made by Miller through David Kaufer (a linguist from what I can gather), and it reminded me of other theorists I have studied. The statement in question is that the stock body of rhetorical knowledge of Classical Greeks was much more small and stable than ours is (158). I think the point is brought up mainly to illustrate how studying the “typical uses and forms of rhetoric [tells] us about the character and culture of an historical period (158), which I think is something we can all agree on. But then Miller goes on to say (through Burke) that in comparison to the Greeks, “ours is an age of ‘marked instability’” and that because of a “wealth of information and a dearth of shared knowledge” we don’t know how to engage with one another in forms of cultural discourse (158). This explanation for an age of “marked instability” seemed vague to me. Why was the mid twentieth century an unstable period?

We can reframe the previous question by asking another one: what is the fundamental difference between Greek society and Western society in the 20th century? Orality and Literacy – or at least that’s what Marshall McLuhan would say. He was a Media Theorist whose ideas I briefly studied last year (in a class taught by Richard Cavell) and who I believe has something to say on Genre Theory. Who was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)? He was a Canadian, Toronto scholar whose life work focused on how mass media have created wide spread change in human behavior and social behavior throughout the last century and a half (0:00 – 2:30 of video) It’s in his first book The Gutenburg Galaxy where he studies the differences between oral cultures and print based cultures. His thesis as a media theorist is ultimately this – the medium through which information is exchanged not only profoundly effects that information (the content, substance, rhetoric, and the higher levels of meanings of form and substance) but also our ways of knowing and being: “the medium is the message.” 

What exactly is a medium? To continue the comparison between oral and print cultures, the medium of communication in an oral culture would be air and the vibrations of our voice carried through our physical bodies. In a print culture, it would be paper, pen, and the distribution of text through the printing press. An example of how these mediums have affected society is to make the generalization that the oral nature of Greek society made their culture more centered around community (since oral communication relies on a real-time exchange between rhetor and audience) as opposed to print society in which privacy (to read and write of without disruption) became necessary in order to engage in civil discourse. Mediums shape our societies and who we are in relation to them.

With this in mind, “the medium is the message” suggests that our mediums of communication not only have a dynamic, active role in shaping discourse, but that they themselves material environments and create material effects.

Miller defines recurrent rhetorical situations as fundamentally social and subjective. Recurrence is a social occurrence, “a social [construct] that [is] the result of definition” and interpretation (156). This is what leads to the creation of types which then becomes the stock body of knowledge of a given culture (156). This conceptualization of recurrent rhetorical situations eliminates the possibility of a materialist perspective; or that any given objective, factual, or external forces have influence on the creation of these types. However the mediums through which we communicate have a profound influence on how we perceive the world, given that they create environments. As such, mediums of communication are an encompassing substance, or the historical context that the discourse takes shape in.

McLuhan has a lot of really interesting things to say about our mediums and how they shape our identity  which, for obvious reasons, I can’t go into at this point in time. For now, there are many more videos to view if you click on the individual headings. In the mean time, here’s something that I think speaks to McLuhan’s own feelings of exigency in relation to his work as a theorist.