Entitlement failure

“’Humanitarian imagery,’ the historian Heide Fehrenbach suggested, ‘is moral rhetoric masquerading as visual evidence.” (63)

image

Amie and Terry are caught in an unforgiving phalanx of substance abuse and poverty. January 6, 2018

“In fifty years much of Western society has inched toward a public-service-lite ‘hollow state,’ a term used to describe a society, most pronounced in the United States and Britain, where the state withdraws from primary responsibility for public-service provision. The move in this direction is based up ‘trickle-down’ economic theory and the belief that self-regulating markets will solve social problems with minimal care in the community.” (66)

“In 1975, more than a quarter of the British population were living in or on the margins of poverty. However, discovering this as a process—explaining why many people remained in poverty—proved more challenging, as the photographers discovered: ‘To document a condition is not to explain it. The condition is a symptom, not a cause; more precisely, it is the outcome of a process.’ The Survival Programmes photographs in themselves were, ultimately, unable to develop a narrative that entirely succeeded in explaining inner-city poverty, although the interviews helped. They hinted at a sort of self-perpetuating ‘culture of poverty’ exacerbated by families unprepared for the form of social change that the political class deemed to be good for them.” (68)

“Documentary photographers committed to exploring the condition of those living in poverty have struggled to understand its nature.” (68)

“Many of the issues that photographers have sought to address in the medium’s first 150 years have been driven by outrage at various forms of what the economist Amartya Sen calls entitlement failure. Sen used the term to imply that problems faced by the poor were not necessarily of their own making. His context was famine, but the same thinking might easily be applied to landlessness, drug addiction, domestic violence, poverty, foreclosure and inner-city housing.” (69)

image

All excerpts from the 2016 book The Documentary Impulse, by Stuart Franklin.