Photographing Deformity: Liu Zheng and His Photo Series "My Countrymen"
Emily Post on Etiquette summarizes a basic rule for civilized behavior:
Q: How do you behave around disabled individuals?
A: Ideally, you behave just as you would around a person who has no visible handicap. Never stare. . . .1
But any photograph of disabled people must ignore Post’s advice: The very act of photographing someone with a disability implies not only intense “staring” but also the decision to record that person’s physical impairment for posterity.2 Consequently, an effort must be made to legitimate this decision: Either the photographer or an interpreter must provide acceptable reasons for the images’ production and existence. These reasons can be (and have been) established on scientific or artistic grounds and can be (and have been) formulated as emotional or ideological motives. Thus R. Ollerenshaw opens the anthology Medical Photography in Practice with his warning against the illegitimate use of clinical photos.3 Diane Arbus’s “freak” portraits have been interpreted in many ways, including as social documentary and as reflections of her “inner chaos.”4 But behind each of these opinions lies a similar compulsion: to justify the supposedly antisocial aspect of images of people with disabilities. Consistent with Post’s advice, there is an assumption that because a person with a disability cannot be stared at inoffensively— because his or her body apparently cannot be wholesomely visually enjoyed—the person with a disability cannot be innocently photographed. That is, pictures of disabled people cannot in good conscience be made without a rationalization based on factors beyond what is apparent in the images themselves. It is this assumption that much of the critical literature of disability studies seeks to overturn.
“Artistic” photographs of people living with a deformity, illness, or disability— along with justifications for making and exhibiting these images—have appeared in China only since the 1980s. Before then, China had not produced its own Arbus or Stanley Burns.5 Rather, the government’s cultural policy discouraged any attempt to reveal “the dark side of society.” Under Mao’s direct patronage, a socialist realist art was developed over the 1950s and 1960s with a mandate to create idealistic images of workers, peasants, and soldiers. The Cultural Revolution further eliminated any individual traits in these images, transforming them into symbolic representations of a healthy, revolutionary people uplifted by the Communist faith. The monopoly that this official art held from the 1960s to 1970s established the historical conditions from which developed two subsequent artistic movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s: “scar art” (shanghen meishu), which depicted human tragedies during the Cultural Revolution, and “native soil art” (xiangtu meishu), which advocated realistic portrayals of ordinary people (albeit still often in a romanticized manner).
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Notes
- Emily L. Post, Emily Post on Etiquette (New York: Perennial Library, 1987), 54.
- It is worth noting Post’s phrase: “behave just as you would around a person who has no visible handicap.” It reminds us that in Western culture staring is rude, period. But if it is necessary to remind readers of this when they encounter a “visible handicap,” are we to assume that disabilities increase human sensitivity to staring or to the tendency to stare? How we answer raises a further question: Whom is Post’s advice ultimately intended to protect? Etiquette manuals are for readers who wish to avoid acting and appearing uncouth. Confronted with a spectacle of disability, Post’s reader is the vulnerable one. A flustered bourgeois public forgets its manners, its eyes a lazy prey to the faux pas of the stare. And so the reminder: Never stare. As well as the questions: Can a photography whose subject is fascination redeem the contretemps? And should it? Ed.
- R. Ollerenshaw, “Medical Illustration in the Past,” in Medical Photography in Practice, a Symposium, ed. E. F. Linssen (London: Fountain, 1961), 1–17, especially 17.
- For conflicting interpretations of Arbus’s work, see Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Avon, 1984); Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1978); and especially David Hevey, “The Enfreakment of Photography,” in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), 332–47.
- Burns is a New York doctor who has published books from his large collection of historical medical photographs, which includes many images of physically disabled and diseased bodies. See Joel-Peter Witkin and Stanley B. Burns, Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive (Pasadena, Calif.: Twelvetrees, 1987). My thanks to Christopher Phillips for providing me with information about Burns and the Burns Archive.