In a recent article on masculinity, Toby Buckle uses words and photographs by Chris Arnade as a starting point for a dissection of a common encountered talking point, namely that masculinity is under attack. This is nonsense, he writes: “there has never been a better time to be a man”.

In passing, Buckle describes how he sees Arnade’s work: “Chris Arnade’s entire project is a sort of voyeuristic ventriloquism: gawping at, and speaking for, people who he imagines can’t speak for themselves.” While there are additional comments about the photographer’s work, this particular sentence struck me.

It struck me not so much because of Arnade’s work, which I have not spent much time with (for the reasons outlined in the article). It struck me because you could use the exact same description for a large section of what we see in the world of photography: a “voyeuristic ventriloquism: gawping at, and speaking for, people who [the photographer] imagines can’t speak for themselves.”

The idea, which also frequently gets voiced in the world of photojournalism, has long bugged me. I’m the kind of person who gets really angry when other people try to speak for me. And I’ve always transferred my own feelings onto other people as well, imagining that other people would get mad if someone else spoke for them.

Why should anyone feel the need to speak for someone who, in their own ways, is perfectly capable of speaking for themselves?

Obviously, the modes of speaking might differ. Few people speak by taking photographs and then sharing them either in the form of big, expensive prints in big, expensive frames or by putting them into what in the larger scheme of things are overpriced books (aka photobooks). Few people have access to the outlets photojournalists get their pictures published in.

But simply because someone can’t get their photographs into a showroom where rich people buy decorations for their homes or into art museums or onto news websites does not mean that they’re somehow mute, that, in other words, they can’t speak for themself and thus need someone else, typically a privileged outsider, to do it for them.

There is an assumption behind all of this, namely that a gallery/museum, a photobook, or a news site carries with itself a specific form of power: Only when you’re able to show your photographs (or words) in those particular contexts are you able to speak for yourself.

It is as if one needed to be anointed in some strange fashion that, ultimately, is tied to a very specific form of power (tied to money).

I certainly do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. There is a reason why I have spent so many years engaging with photography in the particular contexts I mentioned above. I do see value in doing that (in fact, I spent thousands of dollars to get two photobooks published).

But I have always found it so incredibly problematic to tie the context that I usually refer to as photoland to the only or the true way of expressing oneself. It simply is not.

This is why I absolutely do not share photoland’s frequent disdain of the selfie culture, of people photographing and sharing their food on social media, or any of the other supposed ills that people who call themselves photography critics, curators, professors, or whatever else bemoan.

Photography is a practice that is much wider and richer than what is encountered in galleries/museums, photobooks, or on news sites; to belittle people excited about photography as shallow or narcissistic because they essentially aren’t doing what the academy decrees is elitist. And gross.

There is a larger problem behind all of this. In essence, photoland (in which I include its well-off patrons) has created a form of unspoken contract centered on the idea that photographers (fine art or otherwise, but certainly not those amateurs) act as proxies for the rest of the world: only through the hands of a photographer can the world be seen and appreciated.

The audience of such photography not only accepts it as the only and true vision of the world. It also outsources at least part of their conscience to the photographers. The photographers have to take on the role of their audience’s conscience, and most of them do so gladly.

The ills of the world are not very well hidden, and neither is its beauty. It does not take eyes with years of training to see. If, say, you walk past an unhoused person, you do not need a photographer to take their picture, hang it in a white cube, and then invite you to look at this artifact to feel that something is wrong.

But this mechanism, with all of its added steps, is how it works: Outsource your conscience, then buy a token of it being exercised to engage with a typically heavily aestheticized expression of the conscience in action.

And it’s art, and art is not real life; it’s an aspiration that allows for the keeping of the expression of conscience at a large enough mental distance that actual, real-life consequences can be held off (plus the poster of the disadvantaged person might just look great over the couch).

In essence, this mechanism is little more than a contemporary equivalent of the selling of indulgences that was so popular in the Middle Ages (where you could literally pay a priest off if you wanted to engage in sinful activities): As a buyer you exchange money for a visual token of your conscience being exercised by a different person, and you can display that token for effect (even though in the context of neoliberal capitalism mere ownership already confers status).

The reality is that the outsourcing of conscience is a bad deal for everyone. It is a bad deal for the audience who can run away from their own ethical and societal responsibilities — until the accumulated contradictions and problems have become so large that fascists start knocking on doors.

And it’s an especially bad deal for photographers, because not only do they have to do someone else’s mental work, more often than not they also accept responsibility for something they’re mostly not responsible for.

If, to pick an example, you create photography around unhoused people, the responsibility for the fact that the unhoused people in your pictures do not have a place to live in is not completely yours. You might have a part in it, but your part is not any different than that of most other people in the society you live in.

But by creating that project and presenting it in the photoland context, and by accepting the outsourcing of your audience’s conscience, you’re essentially exposing yourself to their rage about what you show them.

Their rage should be directed at the general conditions that create a situation where people cannot afford to pay for a home. Instead, they now blame you, the photographer, for showing them.

We see this procedure in place all the time. The history of photography is filled with examples of photographers getting the sole blame for something they depicted in their pictures.

And the procedure can get pretty obscene, such as when (a recent example) a German journalist commented on a prize winning photograph of a mother in Gaza cradling the wrapped body of her dead child that Palestinians know how to be photogenic victims, implying that somehow, the problem was the photograph — and not the fact that the journalist’s country was and still is actively supporting the conditions for such photography by providing the weapons used to create them.

It is, after all, a lot easier to blame a photographer for showing something one directly or indirectly is responsible for than to have a hard look in the mirror and accept one’s own responsibility.

As I already wrote, this is a lousy deal for every person involved: instead of dealing with the real problem, the discussion now resolves around a proxy, a set of photographs created by a specific person. And if push comes to shove, the photographer has to accept the blame, often because s/he is the only person available.

As lousy a deal as it might be for the audience, it’s a convenient one: the audience does not have to think about their own part. Instead of dealing with their own mental contradictions and their own guilt over something they possibly would like to change but that they’re too lazy, too distracted, too powerless to, they can talk about the manifestation of their outsourced conscience.

I think in the world of economics, this idea is typically described as externalization. By accepting to act according to an audience’s outsourced conscience, a photographer also accepts the costs.

Obviously, this can be a lucrative deal, given that most photography projects are never critically discussed. Collectors will happily pay thousands of dollars for a glorified poster to hang over their couch, without batting an eye over what they’re actually looking at (often picturesque poverty). And selected photojournalists will be flown to Amsterdam so their helicoptered in wares of people in distress can be admired in a beautiful setting.

What gets me about all of this is not only the fact that obviously, this mechanism will never lead to any meaningful change in the world (the photoland system basically sustains itself).

There also is the fact that the underlying premise, part of which is so aptly described by Toby Buckle as “voyeuristic ventriloquism”, is so perverse.

I know and have met a lot of people in photoland, and there actually is a lot of good will and an absolutely sincere desire to make a difference (whatever that might look like for individual photographers). But I’ve also found that thoughtfulness does not automatically translate into thoughtful pictures. Many people subscribe to the idea of voyeuristic ventriloquism.

How have we become stuck in this web, where the way the system works not only neuters our aspirations but also renders us toothless?

Why do we maintain this contract, according to which photographers take on the outsourced conscience of an audience that does not want to deal with its own discomfort (or, possibly, is incapable of doing so)?

A possible attempt to change things might start out with refusal: photographers have to refuse to act as someone else’s conscience.

Photographers also have to refuse to believe in their own bullshit (as if magically their own camera can solve a problem that all those other cameras in the past have been unable to solve).

Photographers have to refuse to speak for other people who supposedly are unable to speak for themselves.

The fact that there is so much photography made around (or with) underprivileged people does not mean that there is meaningful interest in learning from photographs to create change. Instead, it means that the photographs serve as convenient tokens to signal concern — while in actuality, no efforts are being made to change anything.

The fact there there is so little photography made around (or with) rich people does not mean that they’re not of interest. Instead, it means that they can arrange for silence around their privilege, a silence that serves to prevent us from addressing the vast inequality we see all around us.

What people call compassion fatigue is not an affliction of photography. Instead, it’s a collective moral failure. Photographers must not take on responsibility for that moral failure with/in their work (of course as individuals, their task is to face their own moral responsibilities).

Photographers struggled for such a long time to have photography accepted as an art form. But the context of art, however lucrative it might be for many people, is not a meaningful context if anything is supposed to get better. It is walled garden of visual impotence, especially when viewed in relation to the general relevance that photography has today.

Photography is arguably the most widely used medium, and yet many photographers struggle to get their messages across.

It would be too absurd a situation to imagine if it didn’t exist already.