Christos Panagiotou

Photography as participatory democratic medium

People have been always concerned with the distribution of their collective power and the potential to utilize it for either benevolent or malevolent actions. Throughout history various systems such as political systems, social schemata, ideas and media products, are forming the structures in which this power is distributed and exerted. Sometimes, the power is concentrated in a single unit in which is exerted over the mass, and some other times the power is interweaved among the people and exerted towards a common cause. Media culture that mostly grew over the last few centuries has been a major system in which this collective power is distributed and a major structure of organization and participation among people. A particular medium that I refer to below in this essay, and contributed as an empowering tool of social participation is that of social documentary photography, which I represent as a medium for participatory democracy. Because of the capability of the photographic medium to be an analogue of reality, a photographic document is usually perceived as an objective way of representing the facts and taking actions (Moholy-Nagy, 1967). Although this doesnt seem to be very accurate, since photographic medium is dependent on subjective factors such as the decisive moment (Cartier-Bresson, 1952), it nevertheless used to communicate opinions and motivate people to collectively participate towards managing a social problem. Among the first photographers to utilize the power of photography for participation purposes were Lewis Hein and Alfred Stieglitz the former concerned for the children labor (SampsellWillmann, 2009) and the later about social conditions and social inequality during the 1930s economic depression. Since then, photography is being used or democratic purposes and especially nowadays in the contemporary social protests of Internet 2.0. Such Internet-based social protests are the Occupy Movement of 2011-13, the Arab Spring of 2011 and the Antiglobalization movement of Seattle of 1999, where user generated information (among them photography) was used as material of participatory action. Democracy, a name that derives from the merge of the words Demos (greek for public), and kratos (power), insinuates that distribution of the power to the people. The British Political Theorist, David Held, analyzing the way people participate in democratic actions, has distinguished some basic variants in which democracy manifests itself depending on the way the people participate in social actions. Some of them are the Elitist Democracy, a kind of Minimalist democratic participation that consists of a political elite capable of making the necessary decisions for the people (Held, 2006). I believe that an advantage of that kind of democracy is the fact that sometimes people cannot be well informed or know enough to take some decisions. Instead, a specialized elite could be better informed and more experienced in taking decisions (Schumpeter, 2003). On the other hand, one could argue that decisions are based on public needs, so that public sphere should be the one that has to take decisions. So here comes another variant of democracy, the direct democracy, a kind of Maximalist Democracy, which generally promotes active social participation of the

public through egalitarian means. In such systems, people in key positions are controlled and elected through public consensus processes and all public actions are taken from the public itself. All the power is distributed among the people and social structuring is based on egalitarianism. In that case, the benefits of implementation of such democratic practice, is that the public is in control of its own decisions and thus, in my opinion, that is the basic purpose of democracy in general. An interesting concept of direct democracy is polyarchy by Robert Dahl (Dahl, 1972), in which he proposes a completely egalitarian way of involvement in democratic practices through active criticism and active participation of the public. A final basic variant of democracy and the one that I believe is the most relevant in regards with photojournalism that I discuss in this paper is that of participatory democracy. In participatory democracy, public sphere is able to reform and reshape political actions and affect decisions through participation of the citizens to the societal institutions and actions (Zittel, 2007). In contemporary era, such democratic practice it is said to exist through the new media and the internet, where people can express openly and freely their opinions and participate in social actions. An example of these participatory democratic practices can be viewed in the 1999 anti-globalization movement where the people were using the new media and the internet to communicate and cooperate and in the more recent movements of Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement where individual participation via the internet played a major role. In such movements, protestors are equal to express their opinions, to communicate and to take action in the protest, but in general the whole group is unified towards a common goal (Miller, 2011).

The above photographic image represented in the magnum website (http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL 53ZQ5L) is an example of the collective action that constitutes participatory democracy. The photographer Christopher Anderson (2011), was capturing the demonstrators arrests during

the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York in November 2011. Through this image, the moment he captured the photo, the theme of the photo and through the photographic language of this picture (Barthes, 1977), the photographer is embedding a personal meaning, an opinion, a question that wants to be expressed publicly. Through the image he is participating in social actions, because through his embedded message in the photographic medium is trying to provoke and evoke social action. Moreover, as Lewis Hine previously did with his labor photography he is criticizing a social condition (SampsellWillmann, 2009), an element necessary to participatory democracy (Held, 2006). More specifically the above photographic image I believe is aligned to the Occupy Movements ideals of social and economic equality and expresses these concerns by provoking us to take action against social and economic inequality. In the above image we can see that police arrests protestors (the 99% in their slogan) that are protesting peacefully against economic inequality, instead of the Wall Street bankers and economically wealth (the 1%) that are responsible for that inequality. This could be seen as a social discrimination, that the police force for example is being used against the protestors in favor of the economically wealthy. This message embedded in the image could be perceived not only as a reference to the particular event (protestors in New York) but also as a universal message against economic and social inequality that is experienced in the Western World. So the photographer through the photographic medium is calling us to participate and take action in social events in order to reshape the social order another element of Participatory Democracy (Zittel, 2007).

Bibliography

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Dahl, R. (1972). Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press.

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Miller, J. (2011, 10 25). The New York Times. Retrieved 10 21, 2013, from Will Extremists Hijack Occupy Wall Street?: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/opinion/will-extremistshijack-occupy-wall-street.html?_r=0

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