Access of Sight

On page 191, Hum wrote, “We invent what we see.” In the 1880s during The Yellow Peril, Thomas Nast, a self-proclaimed progressive and American cartoonist, documented the “progressive” ideologies at the time. However, his stereotypical portrayals of foreigners and minorities did anything but spread a progressive message. In Mitchell’s article, we look at Jacob Rii’s How The Other Half Lives and examine how the process of the photographs taken during nighttime police raids perpetuate a violent dynamic between a photographer and his subject/powerless victim. Hum breaks down design as a process that roots from existing resources, and in photo-journalism, photographers often go to dangerous extents in order to expose a certain “truth”. However, the intentions of cartoonists and photographers and the constructs of both industries are based on the obsession of making vulnerable moments, peoples, or situations, into subjects of their narrative.

If Thomas Nast saw himself as an anti-slavery progressive, why did he draw African Americans using harmful tropes created by the people he claims to be against? The racialized gaze brings hybridity into designs, not because it is the only resource available, but because it is the dominant narrative. Based on Hum, sight (or the racialized gaze) comes from ideologies of nationalism, identity, morality, and intelligence. Nast could have done better than to use what the dominant culture was using in design by understanding cultures and peoples foreign to him rather than critiquing his own kind with his ignorantly anti-progressive narrative. Understandably, not many knew better at the time, but it does not mean that it was impossible to think differently. Many of the social problems Nast addresses in his cartoons regarding the mistreatment of minorities are caused by ignorance and the desire to colonize, however, Nast does not dig that deep.

Mitchell mentions how the public sphere is “the sphere of private people come together as a public” (363). But when a photographer exposes a “private person”, such as in the case of nighttime police raids of NY slums, it subjects them to a narrative from a position of privilege. The audience-function is drawn to pity the subject and speculate because it is so far removed from the source of the picture. The police raid images do not tell the audience about how the flash of the photograph almost caused a fire in the home where the picture was taken. On page  325, Mitchell refers to how “Foucault offers two basic pictures of power: ‘that which is exerted over things’ and the ways ‘certain persons exercise power over others.’” The truth is never fully exposed in photographs, but the privileged eye is if one acts like a spectator.