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How to tell properly:
“world-travelling” from still-life to the garage
When I watched the show Nanette1 for the first time I already had the structure of the essay and the project ready to present for this exam; after only one hour of the show I decided that everything I had prepared wasn't right. A concept repeated by the comedian several times throughout the show left an impression on me: the need to tell one's story properly. I decided to make an essay about my own essay, just like Gadsby herself did with Nanette breaking her first rule: “Don't make comedy about comedy”2.
Under the title “A Room of One's Own” I had collected a series of photographic shots of domestic spaces to tell the story of the lives of the women who live there. They were ex- colleagues, friends and relatives whose marginalized situations are invisible to society: immigrants in Italy, with illegal jobs, living in precarious houses. I had created a photographic storytelling that wanted to denounce the drama of their lives through photos of their rooms. When I started publishing photos online, describing only the women's country of birth, their age and the place I was photographing, the audience response was positive but the majority of people were struck by the beauty of the shots, not by the message they carried. How come?
Because I wasn't telling the story properly.
I was reminded of a phrase by Dorothy Allison that had struck me: “Behind the story I tell is the one I don't”3. Was there, in my case too, a story that I wasn't telling or that I didn't want to tell? Was that the story that didn't reach the audience?
Comparing the photos I had chosen (ph. 1, 2) with those I had discarded (ph. 3), I realized how most of the saved shots were photos with powerful light and colours; but none of them represented the entire room, just objects and details. Asking myself the reason, I figured out it was because the whole room would tell too much. In creating the collection of photos I had eliminated the crudest shots, those that showed the real condition of discomfort of the entire space, favouring instead a more poetic language, made up of suggestive shots of objects. That is, I made a censorship.
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1 Nanette. Directed by Medelein Perry and John Olb, written and performed by Hannah Gadsby (Netflix,
2018), 69 min.
2 Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation, eBook edition. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020),
178.
3 Dorothy Allison, Two or three things I know for sure, eBook edition. (New York: Penguin, 1996),
https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1127146&site=ehost-live
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Behind my choice there was not only my aesthetic taste but also, and above all, the fear of making those who looked at the photos uncomfortable. As Gadsby notes4, I too understood that pushing the public into a situation of discomfort, exposing them in my case to an unsettling vision, was a dangerous operation both for the public and for myself. Putting other people in a "non-safe space"5 means taking on the role of someone who destroys an expectation of safety. Even when behind this discomfort there is the desire to denounce an injustice or to convey a truth: you end up taking on the role of a "killjoy" person6.
The desire to remain within a safety situation, a so called comfort zone, corresponds to our desire to feel good, to be happy. I use the word happiness precisely because “even when we want different things, it is assumed we all want happiness. Happiness becomes a container for the diversity of humans wants”7. What we define as "good" is always something that is in the direction of our happiness8; on the contrary, everything that threatens it is defined as “bad”. The photograph of a still life inside a painter's atelier (ph. 1 , 2) can evoke the memory of old Flemish paintings or the romantic fascination for bohemian creative spaces; but it does not threaten our happiness. The photograph of the entire atelier as a dark and damp garage is already less popular. If this same garage is then shown as an inhabited house, where the toilet and stove are in the same corner hidden by a dark curtain (ph. 3), then the photo puts the viewer in a "non-safe space" because it places them in front of a reality of discomfort without filters.
As Maria Lugones reminds us, being at ease means feeling good in your own reality, but those who feel good in their own reality often do not cultivate interest in the realities of others9. Being at ease is as dangerous as putting other people in a position of discomfort because it does not allow you to travel through the "worlds" of others: it does not allow you to identify with others10, nor to understand or love them11; it does not give the possibility of becoming a different person12. Being at ease means seeking and accepting normative happiness, submitting to its rules13 or, as in my case, applying them: the photos I had posted online corresponded to this expectation. They didn't show discomfort; they didn't make you feel uncomfortable.
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4 Gadsby, Ten Steps, 187.
5 Gadsby, Ten Steps, 180.
6 Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Kindle edition (London: Penguin, 2023), 1.
7 Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy, 94.
8 Ibid.
9 Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, “World”-travelling, and Loving Perception” Hypatia, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer,
1987): 12.
10 Lugones, “Playfulness”, 7.
11 Lugones, “Playfulness”, 8.
12 Lugones, “Playfulness”, 11.
13 Lugones, “Playfulness”, 12.
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I asked myself why I had created the “A Room of One's Own” project; why had I collected all that material and then censored it? I realized that behind my photographic storytelling motivation there wasn't so much the desire to denounce, but rather a feeling of love towards what I was photographing, which represented the reality I come from and the people I'm linked to.
It is a complex feeling that includes my sense of belonging and identity, a huge part of my past and of my present; a feeling that tells the history of my emotions and the geography of my relationships since it contains the traces of what I have experienced as a colleague, as a friend, as a cousin, as a daughter. It is a feeling that contains all the “travel” I have made in the various “worlds” I have known. But it is not only the result of all these "world-travelling"; it is also a constant exercise in discomfort because as bell hooks says: "The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control”14. Being connected to others, loving them, means living in a fragile place that doesn't always protect you from the bad weather that affections may cause. I realized that although I was used to travelling different "worlds" and living with the anxieties that love entails, I was not willing to subject the spectator to the same tension. Why? Why wasn't I telling the story properly? Was I, as Bettina Judd asks, running away from the feelin15? In part, yes.
Photographing degraded spaces that tell the story of an invisible precarious situation is a complex process of knowledge production, "the knowledge produced in the 'delirium of a felt life'"16, not simple documentation. But what if that same invisible precariousness also represents the very reality in which you live? The knowledge you are producing will also be imbued with your history and your feelings: it stops being complex work; it becomes a complex and painful work. Or, as Bettina Judd suggests: “[an] internal and complex sensation entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy”17. Why do I avoid tension for the viewer? Because I struggle to manage it myself. Why do I cut the photo? Because it says too much of what I'm not yet willing to tell.
The story I don't tell is the story of a deep and unresolved anger: that of the people who inhabit those spaces; and mine. And I don't want to hand over this anger to others, just as it
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14 bell hooks, All About Love: Love Song to the Nation. Kindle edition (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018), 185.
15 Bettina Judd, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. ProQuest Ebook Central (Northwestern University Press, 2022), 4.
16 Judd, Feelin, 6.
17 Judd, Feelin, 7.
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is - a dark, dirty room, saturated with stacked objects - just to break their comfort. I don't want, as Gadsby says at the end of her show, to “spread anger”; because anger is tension18. And tension doesn’t make people feel good. This is not the love that I was taught and that I feel, the one that pushes me to tell stories to change the worlds I don’t like. But I also don't want to move within the limited perimeter of a normative happiness created by others for others. A “conditional happiness”19 which leads to presenting to the public what we believe the public wants. Even when what they want is our own invisibility.
“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification”20 only if you have found a way to live with it or if you have managed to move beyond your anger, to look at it from afar. But when you are still trapped inside your own feeling then anger becomes “the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood”21.
I don't know if I'm a prisoner of my anger; but I'm definitely afraid of it. Fear of misusing it: of upsetting those I want to help, of pushing away those I want to bring closer. I have read Lorde's article on the uses of this feeling many times and every time one point of her speech continues to strike me as much as the first: “We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty”22. I believe that this “excavating honesty” is the “proper telling” that I was looking for.
I started out thinking of delivering a photographic storytelling work on the invisibility of women living in disadvantaged social situations and I realized how I myself, with my work, was contributing to continuing their invisibility. Instead of selecting large-field photos of entire rooms, dark and degraded as they appear to those who enter them, I was delivering a selection of still-lifes with a romantic slant that idealized the spaces, making them muffled and nostalgic.
The complexity of emotions that constituted my strong motivational impulse was also what prevented me from achieving the purpose of my work: the love that drove me to document the spaces was as strong as the anger towards the injustice that those same spaces represent. I didn't want to have to relive all the contrasting emotions that those realities brought to light. So I only chose the “harmless” shots realizing that I too, like the public I’ve talked about, wanted to remain in comfort, experience normative happiness, see beautiful
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18 Nanette, 1:06:30. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80233611 trackId=255824129&tctx=0%2C0%2Cd201e389-9f6b-4d84-93bd-7118fe31a4b0-146440808%2Cd201e389-9f6b-4d84-93bd-7118fe31a4b0-146440808%7C2%2Cunknown%2C%2C%2CtitlesResults%2C%2CVideo
19 %3A80233611%2CdetailsPagePlayButton Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy, 96.
20 Audre Lorde, “The uses of anger” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall, 1981): 8.
21 bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Kindle edition (New York: Atria Books, 2004), 44.
22 Lorde, The uses of anger, 8.
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4photos, even when those same photos were mine and the stories they were telling were, instead, very sad.
I wondered if this was a betrayal or simply one of the many compromises that life throws at you; if there was a difference between compromise and betrayal. And I decided it didn't matter.
I understand that to tell properly I just need to excavate with honesty; even if I am afraid of what is found, even if what is found makes the world and myself uncomfortable. What I have to do with the findings of this excavation can be decided with a little compassion, which is the love towards both the work and the audience; and with a little courage, which is what it takes to move beyond anger. Alongside the photos of the various details, I have also started publishing photos of the entire spaces.
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Photos
A., born in Romania, age 43, the atelier
1, 2
3
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Cited works
Ahmed, Sara. The feminist killjoy handbook. Penguin, 2023.
Allison, Dorothy. Two or three things I know for sure. Penguin, 1996.
Gadsby, Hannah. Ten Steps to Nanette: a Memoir Situation. Allen & Unwin, 2020.
hooks, bell. All About Love (Love Song to the Nation). William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018.
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria Books, 2004.
Judd, Bettina. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought.
Northwestern University Press, 2022.
Lorde, Audre. “The uses of anger”. Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall, 1981):
pp. 7-10, http://www.jstor.com/stable/40003905.
Lugones, Maria. “Playfulness, “World”-travelling, and Loving Perception”. Hypatia, Vol. 2,
No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 3-19, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810013.
Nanette. Directed by Medelein Perry and John Olb. Distributed by Netflix, 2018. film.
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