Global Strategy - blog

Once again a public lecture put forward a combination of views. This time the topic was: 'The Future of Picturing the World: filming and imaging in a global era'.

The speakers moved between the change in the narrative objectives of aid campaigns to the embeddedness of reporting in military operations (read: Iraq). The most thought-provoking of the presentations, however, was Renzo Martens' video depicting the asymmetry of moral positions in photojournalism, depending on the person behind the viewfinder.

In his film that was filmed in Congo, he tries to show the local photographers how to make more money. Before they got their living mainly from shooting weddings and birthday parties. Martens' solution is to capture on film what the West, that is, the global photograph market, wants to see. Misery.

So, he uses whiteboard to motivate them of the economic feasibility of his view and then proceeds to show in practice how exactly to film the starving children so that the audience can see their ribs properly. Afterward, they went to sell the photos to the agencies. However, they were turned down on the pretext that "the photographers were locals".

Thus, filming and imaging raped women, rotting corpses of fallen rebels and starving children is immoral when a native is doing it. On the other hand, if the Associated Press sends a legion of professional photographers to the conflict zone doing the exact same thing, it is a form of reporting.

To Martens, the greatest asset of the developing countries is their very poverty. And right now, they are not able to cash it out properly. Instead, global media conglomerates feast on the bones of the poor.