In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Painter's Eye:Paul-Henri Bourguignon's Haitian Photographs
  • Erika Bourguignon (bio)

Je ne regard pas. Voire me suffit.

(I don't look. Seeing is enough for me.)

—Paul-Henri Bourguignon

I

We of the industrialized world of the twenty-first century are awash in photography. As an anonymous Portside posting of March 9, 2012 reads: "As the camera shrinks in size, becomes ever present and hardly ever noticed, its impact just keeps growing." Who could argue with that? The Portside writer's take on this situation is distinctly optimistic: "The video record is our collective memory, our conscience, our shield against deception and amnesia; our political as well as artistic resource of choice." But is it really? Is it not also pervasive surveillance and invasion of privacy? Can we be sure that the resulting pictures will not be used for the manipulation of the historical record, of our opinions and attitudes, whether political, aesthetic, or economic? Is it not true that at present the manipulation or "editing" of photographs, whether of events or individuals, is within the reach even of teenagers? How then can we distinguish the actual from the fictive? [End Page 357]

There was a time, not long ago, when we could be fairly confident that what photographs showed us was trustworthy—and yet that was not always to be taken for granted. We now know, for example, that the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union was notorious for revising history: when members of the political leadership lost their positions they also lost their very existence; they were edited out of history and therefore out of all official photographs. We eventually discovered that some of what seemed to be among the most iconic images of our time were staged—which was, to say the least, disenchanting. Now, however, to help us out, there is a new field of expertise: "image forensics."

Can we imagine, find, or remember societies where the camera and its pictures played little, if any, role? The photographs to be discussed in this essay deal with such a time and place: Haiti in 1947-1948, as seen through the lens of the Belgian artist and writer Paul-Henri Bourguignon. Haiti was then a country with a society that was in many ways different from any other. With a population of some three million people, ninety percent of whom were illiterate, it was both isolated from and integrated into the world economy and world politics. But I will say more about all this later. Before turning to the photographer and to Haiti as it looked in those years it will be helpful to establish a larger context. This includes a brief look at the significant role photography has played in the creation and the continuing development of modernity. It is no exaggeration to say that photography dramatically changed—and continues to change—how people see and experience the world in which they live and how they see both themselves and each other.

Humans comprise a single biological species with a number of shared characteristics. As Francey Russell (2012) has reminded us, among these are, in the terms of Kant's philosophy, "certain active cognitive capacities" (p. 355). This perspective implies that, given the same capacities, people everywhere will share fundamental spatial and temporal understandings of the world. Russell shows how Freud's concept of the ego linked these cognitive capacities to the development of the individual. And yet, although they share capacities and psychological processes, ethnographic research has shown [End Page 358] that in spite of what they have in common—call it "human nature"—human groups do not necessarily experience the world about them in the same way. They live rather in what the anthropologist A.I. Hallowell (1955) called a "behavioral environment" that is "culturally constituted" (p. 87). He based his initial formulation on his long-term study of a group of Canadian Indians, the Northern Ojibwa, people who lived by hunting, fishing seasonally, and gathering (Hallowell, 1955, 1992). The Ojibwa had developed a sophisticated knowledge and skilled use of their resources, especially of the animals they hunted, of plant foods they collected, such as wild rice, and of birch bark that...

pdf

Share