This is in response to a sharp and insightful post written in response to my somewhat shoddy piece on migrant workers for the Korea Herald. Both my prose and my approach should have been sharper, better thought out. As it was, a reader named Tres caught me with my proverbial pants down, pointing out some problematic aspects of the way I set myself up in relation to others who focus on or do work in the same area. Here are Tres's words:
Do you notice how many times in this piece you say that you "just" want to do something? As you continuously strive for some elusive golden mean, avoiding the electrified "sides" as if life where some game of Berzerk, you can't help but impugn everyone else but yourself and the subjects that have had the good fortune to fall under your gaze, as you claim a pure ground where you merely want to "just" do something or other. While you show a keen analytical mind elsewhere, your belief in obtaining some sort of meaning that is "just" one thing or another, whilst everyone else is on some corrupted, dogmatic, and partisan side, is both disappointing and disingenuous. You provide a perfect representation of the most damning of centrist ironies: that the main ideological proposition of centrism is that there is no ideology at all.
Either the mistreatment of these workers is an institutionalized problem or it isn't - and if it is, why should pointing that out and then fighting against that necessarily portray the workers as "hapless victims"? It doesn't. While Korean political activists who work hand in hand with the migrant workers may not provide photo spreads of "a day in the life of..Mr. Migrant Worker X", that doesn't mean that they condemn these workers to the status of "hapless victim." The broad brush you use is both unfair to activists and overly sympathetic to yourself. According to your formulation, those who want to participate in this social movement are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They should all just go get some cameras and just take pictures... right?
I noticed this line of thought in your earlier piece on prostitutes, but i hedged commenting, even after the premise you tried to spell out in your "just reporting" via the voice of the happily employed working woman (moralists are stupid/activists are clueless/working women are doing just fine, thanks) was blown out of the water by recent news of Korean women being lured into indentured servitude in the United States. Now that I see this seems to be your standard m.o. I can't help but offer my thoughts, though generally people convinced of their unideological purity usually seem emboldened by criticism from those perceived to be stained with the sin of being on "a side."
Regardless of my complaints... your work is indeed engaging, and for that, you certainly deserve praise and encouragement. I'll definitely be checking back regularly.
My response: you've hit the nail on the head and I have to give you kudos for pointing out a valid point regarding my point of view and approach to advocating for social change. One of the major concerns I have in all of my work is that of trying to fairly portray my subjects while criticizing or otherwise representing them. Since I consider myself more than just a photojournalist possessed of a dedication to an idealistic notion of objectivity, I definitely do have an agenda in all my work, both visual and otherwise. My goal is that of somehow effecting or helping in the effort to bring about social change. However, at odds with this is the fact that I have to somehow represent a certain subject (visual or thematic) somewhat "accurately" or at least fairly even as I engage in critique of that very subject.
It's a hard line to walk, and when I step over the line, it sometimes means that I can fall into a tendency to set up a straw man to knock down on the one hand, or for me to fall into an overly safe sense of false "objectivity" that can get me into trouble. As it is, I tend to err on the side of the former, as I have more than once been caught being preachy and sanctimonious. But this is why I try to check myself – by running my photographs and ideas past different types of Korean folks, or trying to bounce my little pet theories off and around different types of folks, and also by maintaining this blog.
The Korea Herald piece, actually, is not some of my best photography, nor is it an example of writing that I am particularly proud of. Some of my ideas about the issue of migrant workers are a little half-baked and come off for what they are – the product of someone who had not thought long and hard about this issue before being assigned to cover the story, combined with the fact that my research was necessarily "crash course" in its depth.
But when you put something out there, you gotta claim responsibility for it, which I do. Tres, you're right, and your sharp insights zeroed right in on a trap that I find myself falling into – that of defining a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" conundrum for everyone who is simply not...me.
