“I’ve been looking at some great books on migration recently but I wonder if the rhetoric that applies to them isn’t a bit rehashed sometimes, isn’t said because that is what you are supposed to say. It’s defensive theory to block off criticism that dehumanises and objectifies. Perhaps ideas that restaging and collaboration, and giving people cameras, that scratching and painting and writing, going all the way back to Wendy Ewald and beyond, aren’t just a bit tired. Is it just something we say to make ourselves feel less guilty or does it actually mean something. i don’t know.
Or is giving somebody a camera or asking them to draw on their pictures or make a collage aren’t the most patronising and colonial thing ever., more concerned with the photographer as moral hero than with anything else. Or perhaps the whole calvinist tone of so much of this theory shares more with a colonial era vicar ministering to his flock and lecturing them on the evils of this or that. It shuts out so much, and can be joyless in a way that belongs to a particular geographic and economic privilege. It’s like watching what I imagine a Church of England sermon would be on a small British colonised island (oh, and there is theory that thinks the same thing – the greatest legacy of British colonialism is its shitty, condescending moralising voice).”
– Colin Pantall, from Carmelo Stompo and Kindness in Photography
