#as a way of reclaiming agency from a world and a culture that has starved her of it

[bitternanami]

been watching nezumiva's retrospective of aa3 and like always im Thinking About Her. alt text has img description

(w crop because tumblr messed w the quality a bit)

[limeadestandworks]

Entrepreneurship as practical tools for liberation, not as an end in itself

Those who are familiar with me know many years of my involvement in radical political activism. From time to time, I have taken a number of radical positions on social concerns. For example, I have opposed same-sex marriages because I believed that the institution of marriage was a relic of the oppressive patriarchal social norms, and therefore ought to be abolished altogether instead of being co-opted by middle-class gays and lesbians. Another example: I oppose the private property and believe it should be nationalized along with natural resources, key national-scale industries, and other major means of productions. From time to time I have been mischaracterized as a communist, a fascist, an anarchist, and a few others I would not mention here. (Note: Nowadays I am more of a centrist on many issues after I was really disillusioned with certain elements of the left-radical activism after the demise of the Occupy movement.)

So, after all these years of being a radical rebel, it often comes to many as a surprise that (1) I am an entrepreneur, and (2) I am in the business of “marketing” other entrepreneurs’ businesses and of teaching other people how to become an entrepreneur.

It has been just over a year since I embarked on the latest iteration of this journey in entrepreneurship, but it’s not a new thing.

My debut in micro-enterprise, in fact, was in 2008 when I was experiencing a prolonged homelessness without any foreseeable hope of ending it. Despite the fact that Portland, Oregon was seen as a “bums’ paradise” by many ignorant people, the Public-Private Homeless Charity Industrial Complex offered nothing of substance to those on the street, other than “services” and “resources” that only kept people on the street. Having no way of generating even a smallest of income stream, I was only able to survive because Portland was one place where it was impossible to starve thanks to over-abundance of charities that did nothing but feed the homeless.

One day I saw a flier at a certain social service agency advertising an upcoming class that promised to teach participants how to earn money painting windows during the holiday season. This class was put on by one of the interns who was there from a nearby university. Three people (of hundreds who utilized that facility!) signed up for this, and ultimately, I was the only one who took the idea and ran with it. Between 2008 and 2010, I operated this business literally out of a plastic tub and I painted lots of windows in the greater Portland area including some well-known businesses such as Davis Tools (a defense contractor!), Les Schwab Tire Centers, Lithia Auto, and Pacific Lumber & Truss. I soon expanded this business to traditional sign painting as well as logo design. The original logo of Southeast Grind was my work (the current one is based on my work but redesigned by someone else). I made a few thousand dollars during those years, which had an immensely positive impact in my life. At the time, I knew little about entrepreneurship or business management, but somehow I had a natural knack for it — and without any advertising budget, utilizing only free resources, I grew my business.

I am someone who can attest to the power of micro-enterprise in alleviating the extreme poverty.

In 2011, I joined the second class of the Dorothy Day Community School (DDCS), a community organizing training center that was then run by Sisters Of The Road. As part of this, I was also able to participate in the 2011 Activists Mobilizing for Power (AMP) conference at Reed College, sponsored by the Western States Center.

Together with two other members of the DDCS class, we organized a group called the Jaguar Sisters. Its vision was to create opportunities for self-empowerment, dignity, and personal power to women who are either experiencing homelessness or are seeking to exit survival sex work. Among the three key programs of the Jaguar Sisters, I proposed a creation of a micro-enterprise program in which the women could capitalize on their own creative talents to generate their own income — and ultimately build an hyper-local economy of solidarity by networking and collaborating with one another.

I have not sold out to capitalism.

I make a clear distinction between capitalism and free market economy.

The former is a predatory system by absentee speculators (“investors,” “venture capitalists,” whatever). The latter is the people’s quest for economic and social self-determination apart from the speculators-owned Corporate America, from the governmental system, and from the Public-Private Charity Industrial Complex that all dehumanize us.

I am not here to support or promote “lifestyle business” and “lifestyle marketing,” both of which are mostly about privileged white middle-class people to “live a lifestyle they want.”

Neither my conscience nor my ethics would allow that to happen.

Yes, my Creative Liberation Lab seems to resemble a lot of those “lifestyle business” charlatans who are mostly there to prey on desperate people in a challenging life situation. But similarities end the moment you understand what my vision is: to turn the people on the margins of society into active participants in the local economy is to turn those who are “undesirable” “liabilities to society” into respectable, dignified assets to the community; and in so doing, I disrupt the classist, sexist, heteronormative, racist, ableist social norms, restore the personal power and dignity in every human being, and re-establish the social and economic rights and liberties for those whose rights are systemically denied.

In other words, if it’s not for the liberation of the community and the collective, any claim to “freedom” that comes from entrepreneurship is merely self-serving and therefore is just a vanity. It’s no good.

In a longer term, I’d also like to see those individual micro-entrepreneurs to form joint ventures, cooperatives, chambers of commerce, or worker-owned collectives — thus turning this Micro-Revolution from an individual level to a much greater level of engagement in the community as a visible and independent economic force.

As I have recently written on the website, “Limeadestand Works is here to present a possibility of another path forward for those without socio-economic privileges, with tangible and workable solutions for individuals to undermine the System that does not serve them by using its own game book. In so doing, we not only hope to transform individual lives but also re-shape our culture and build a new world within the shell of the old. We call this process the Micro-Revolution, a radical reclaiming of our human dignity, personal power, socio-economic sovereignty, and freedom. Through Micro-Revolution we learn and achieve to be a ‘master of one’s own destiny.’”

Consider:

More than 80 percent of adults on the autism spectrum are unemployed. Many of them cannot easily participate in the workforce or survive in the workplace culture. Yet, most individuals on the spectrum are talented enough in at least something that they can succeed as a freelancer or an independent entrepreneur.

According to a 2013 study, trans workers were twice as likely to lose their jobs, and 44 percent of those who were employed were under-employed; and are nearly four times as likely as the general population to have an annual income of under $10,000. This has forced many trans folks to survive through sex trade or crimes. Micro-enterprise can provide some solutions to this.

Under the Republican-led Congress and the Trump administration, those who are deemed “unemployable” by the government due to disabilities are likely to experience a steep reduction in their SSI checks — and this follows recent cuts in SNAP benefits. Not all SSI recipients have Section 8 housing subsidies. SNAP cannot be used to purchase medications, personal care items, clothing, or any non-food items, including transportation (transit fares, gas). SSI recipients can see an improvement in their quality of lives, not just in terms of dollars and cents, when they become a business owner and interact with the larger society.

Those who are experiencing homelessness are unlikely to be hired by most employers due to hostile biases and overt discrimination. Many of them also have other barriers to participation in the conventional workforce. “Get a job!” is not a solution.

To sum this up, I’m not here to help privileged people to solve their first-world problems so they can indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle. Too many desperate people who don’t have money, to begin with, are often lured by these “lifestyle marketing” gurus and their illusions of a “six-figure” lifestyle where every day is a vacation on the beach. I’m not here to dupe them into a useless “lifestyle business” fluff, either.

To me, entrepreneurship is just a practical tool in the larger picture of liberation.

And in this society, it provides a much better alternative to a life of dependency on the dehumanizing Public-Private Charity Industrial Complex (a.k.a. poverty pimps) or on the dead-end jobs with the corporations that exploit workers.

(Originally published on Aug. 18, 2017.)

p.s.: The cover photo for this article is Gabriela Rivadeneira, former president of the Legislative Assembly of Ecuador. She is eight years younger than me and has already been to the top of the legislative branch of a national government! Gabriela started her activism when she was 14. I really adore her. When will there be possibilities like this in the U.S.?

Photo credit: De Edjoerv — Trabajo propio, Creative Commons Public License 4.0 BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons

[sofiatopchishvili-blog]

Essay 1 version, final

BA Photography: Advanced Research Methods (5IMAG016W)

Is it ethical to photograph suffering? Analyse between one and three case studies.

Photographing suffering, and strong emotional scenes creates otherworldly sense of the reality. Photography as the medium is seen first of all as the subjective medium, even though it has greater, higher realms of representing and mimicking life, which sometimes can be mixed with truth. Actually photography is more ambiguous as the medium, in comparison to film of fine art for example. As the still sits in between those mediums, it is still as the painting, but sharp and accurate as film. Photojournalism as a genre confuses the viewer because of its actual purposes. It is the reportage genre that later would be embedded along side with the contextual meanings, that could and will change the message carried out. We all fragment our identity, by our experience, surroundings and nurture, even though when you act as an observer, during the visit to the exhibition you are guided and shown what you were designed to see. Capitalist structuralism, engages human psychology to send the message to the society that later would be used for the profit. So in the end of the day the question is can we really control our identity, and individualism, do we have free will?

Photography is a medium that became our eyes, the ‘god eye – the big brother’ that seizes to see and control our free will and our identity. The nature of this tool follows its mechanical reproduction that is controlled by certain individual groups for the sake of the profit. And photographing suffering became the genre that started elevate widely, because of it brutality, blunt reality. Suffering - that viewer sees on social media, or on the cover of the LIFE magazine is creating a nation of the non-empathetic robots. Is there a limit of photographing, suffering? The answer does not merely matter; social norms already have been twisted and moved around in different directions, the main importunacy is for what, and for whom. With photography, there’s always the temptation to strive for perfection and disregard – or worse, delete- anything that falls out. But this for perfection can choke you inner creativity. Photographers bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that is worth recording, simplest message decode that - I have decide that seeing this is worth recording.  ”We think of photographs as works of art, as evidence of a particular truth, as likeness, as news items. Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us’’ John Berger, October 1986. Extensesionalism thoughts include the ideas, of individuality, moral beliefs, ideology, freedom of speech, how this idea may fade into the world of photography? .  Family of Man exhibition at MOMA museum in New York in 1955 changed the interpretation of photography. The propaganda becomes very important element after the Berlin division 1945-1990, the informative war between the communist and capitalist that still cares on, only under different slogans. Cold War atmosphere was raising, the propaganda war shifted photographic approach. The exhibitions itself were staged quite theatrically, the text almost guides the observer through the different stages, the juxtaposition between the scales of the image evokes higher influence of trauma, foreshadowing the terror, creating some sort of the patronising reminder for civilians. The Nuclear threat that was made in 50s was used as the fear factor as nowadays the threat of the terrorism is used to remind us of drastic events of Twin Towers which was ironically created for political benefit (could be argued) as what we see on the surface controls the population, the hidden commands/emotions waiting to be obeyed such as islamophobia. As Hilton, Kramer stated: “self - congraturaly means for obscuring the urgency of real problems under a blanket of the ideology which takes for granted the essential goodness, innocence and moral superiority of the international ‘little man’ and which regards itself as superior to mere politics”.  As well as Roland Barthes, wrote in his book  Mythologies (then ironically after publishing was used by advertising companies): “The ambiguous myth of the human ‘community’, which serves an a alibi to a large part of humanism, the form this pluralism, a type of unity, is magically produced, a man is born, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way, god is re –introduced intro our Exhibition” The Great Family of Man 1957.  Furthermore, William Klein’s photographs were the start of the photojournalistic era, The Family of Man was the exhibition that was obviously influenced by Klein’s rural, realistic moments of crushing American Dream. The Family of Man exhibition created non-empathetic nation, the post – fascist family of man that is used to benefit the terror. As in  1750 Duhamel du Monceau once said: “ a pastime of helots, a distraction for uneducated, wretched, overworked creatures who are consumed by their worries, a spectacle that requires no concentration of any kind, that presupposes no ability no concentration of any kind, that presupposes no ability to think, lights no flame in people’s heart, and kindles no other sort of hope than the ludicrous one of becoming at some time, a ‘star’ in Los Angles”. However, Fred Turner, the defender of the exhibition, argued that the show was driven by a ‘deeply’ democratic, even utopian impulse (The Family of Man and the politics of attention in cold war America public culture 2012) as well as that Eric Sandeen claimed that: “the viewers would ‘reassemble’ the images in the exhibition and the ‘architecture of the exhibition’ encourages such a freedom on the part of the viewer’. Yes, the exhibition did depict the entire new spectacle for American people, however it did not promote freedom on the other hand it restricted it. The exhibition was promoted by the United States agency, commercial promotion sponsorship by big corporations like coca cola. Why there was the shift in post war photography to more objective rather than subjective ideas, do appearances only reveal the truth very occasionally?

The expression that lies in the objectivity of the stranger is committed to the specific tendencies of the crowd; therefore a photographer approaches them with the unique attitude of “objectivity”. In The Stranger,  Simmel stated that: “objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.” As well as that objectivity may also be defined as freedom: the objective individual in this case the photographer is bound by no pledges which could mark his perception, understanding and assessment of the given scene. The freedom of photographing the given however allows the stranger to experience and treat even close relationships though from an aisle view, might contain multiple of dangerous possibilities. In  George Orwell novel 1984 which is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Having witnessed first-hand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise communism. This book shows the dystopian futuristic landscape that we live in now. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous. In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Furthermore, photographer plays freer role in more practically and theoretically, he is less to judge but rather to select and assess. Photography constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status. It is well known that this antithesis is one of the major myths of Pujadism. The mass media in the age of its rise, and reclaimed the subject as a matter of quasi-philosophical thought, all the while repudiating its actual productions. There’s no dynamism in his analyses - he turns their ‘’signifiers’’ and their ‘’signified’’ into fixed objects- and there’s no psychology either-no agency and no motives, other than the eternal one of ‘’bourgeois’’ society’s self-perpetuation.

Albino Boy, Biafra (1969) Don McCullin

Choosing an example of Don McCullins work your observe that there is no limit, in shooting the subject. Photographer itself acts as the passing individual the stranger that does not subjective matter to the object he is photographing, and when it comes to photographing suffering pain and war, photographer is seen as an intruder and the camera as a reminder of terror that happened to the people. John Le Carre wrote in the introduction to Don McCullin’s Hearts of Darkness: “ McCullin is talking of the elusive moment of connection with his subject – the ‘yes’. The moment of naked affinity, when he or she sees him, and forgives him, at death’s edge, starving, inconsolably bereaved, when their own child lies dead on the hall florr, bombed in the attack: still ‘yes’. Yes, take me. Yes, show the world my pain. And I remember reading or hearing somewhere that an ailing buck has been to hang from the herd, and to turn and face his predator with acceptance: ‘yes’.”  The book itself alludes to the  Heart of Darkness novel by Joseph Conrad, where white people (the British) are invading Congo, traveling alongside the Congo River. As John Le Carre stated that Don McCullin stated that he had felt acceptance and felt forgiven, he still remained a stranger who wouldn’t feel the the same pain, the same terror. As shown in this visual example, the Biafra’s albino boy is seen as a victim, he is only seen as a starved child that needs urgent help and support. Yes, he does but that’s the dilemma, after photojournalistic revelations, guilt is used against humanity; the factor of fear is turned against our consciousness. These photographs would be raising and helping charities that merely half of them really give that help and support boys such as in this picture. Photography is the medium that would never be expressive, as the tool that is used to photograph already kills the aura of it, and the whole humanity with it.

The concept of photo-manipulation roots itself into photography that shifts and manipulates the points of view, that only the photographer captured but it shifts the interpretation, the whole meaning that would be carried out through the medium of photography. As Guy Debord – the society of the spectacle (1967) stated: ‘‘Images detached form life, separated from original context and re-united as an autonomous world- apart from lived experience’’ – how much advertising, the images of food, fashion, medicine and news builds your ideology and self- awareness? The way we are mediated my images, because in western world society is placed in the comfort zone with privileged life’s advertising and consumption takes over society’s values. Advertising creates this spectacle, the entertainment of commercial photography. The agrarian aspect, being banned in America to grow your own food, being forced to buy and consume the food, that America wants people to consume for the profit. When you gaze at the photograph you see what you are desired to see. Taking philosophies of Roland Barthes and his text  Camera Lucida he stated ’Certain details may ‘prick’ me. If they do not, it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally’’. Roland Barthes, helps the reader to decode the language of propaganda. Higher class of capitalism structuralism controls photographer’s archives history in prints and usually photographer’s ideology, such as domestic iconography of the 60s and its patriarchal empowering of the image of the domestic wife.

The expansion of the punctum in this print fills the whole image with its contextual meaning. The image itself paradoxically satires camera as a tool to manipulate masses and it breaks rules of tuché photography. The ghost of painting in this image torments photograph. Benjamin Walter states in his essay  The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction:’’ The photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision…Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’’ Photography hand gives way to the eye, following that acceleration of production of images; marketing brings these into the home like utilities. Authenticity is destroyed in mechanical reproduction, firstly through the unique temporal spatial existence of the work gives it historical and physical properties which reproductions don’t have and secondly process of reproduction are more independent of the original. Roland Barthes, talks about the performance of ‘the pose’ which occurs subconsciously while the object is being photographed: ’’ for the photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive’’. The person becomes the object for the photographer, ‘’private space’’ eliminates when the shutter goes off. Camera Lucida suggests the oxymoron of the duality in photography, at the same time making an object immortal and mirroring history of the past. Additionally, Roland Barthes talks about the sound that camera makes- when sound frizzes the essence of time, he describes the sound as the positive means of flashback that makes the whole process of taking an image less frightening, suggesting his personalised phenomenology in this text. Transcendental phenomenology, according to Husserl, is the study of the basic components of the meanings that make intentionality possible. Camera Lucida is in homage to ( Sartre) was the key in the introduction of phenomenology to France during Barthes’s youth. Influenced by Husserl philosophies, Barther’s established further concepts of phenomenology, by introducing concepts of studium and punctum. Barthes described stadium - as the ordinary, the recognisable pattern that has no punctum in it, eidos that either pleases or displease spectator. He described it, as the order of liking, not of loving. Barth established that:’’ the studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, ‘’politeness’’) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices, but to experience ’in reverse’, according to my will as a Spectator’’.  Photographs, work as alibis, to inform, to represent, or to shock the observer, on the other hand punctum – contained in those far rarer images that Barthers says moves or ‘wound’ him, something which is seen differently, depending on a observer, and his experience and knowledge.

Photography captures a moment in time, but what it captures exceeds the intention of the photographer. Therefore, photography accesses a differently constituted reality, with layers useable by the naked eye and made perceptible only by technological means. A spark of contingency finds its way onto the photographic image. In Benjamin Walter’s earliest wirings  The Life of Students, published in 1915, he wrote of how ‘history rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers’’. The focal point is the matter for cameras and photographs, the point where the endless forms are seen. Photographing suffering is an inevitable subject matter that is already is rooted to deep inside our social, economical and political system.

Bibliography

• Allan Sekula, coming from the left wing perspective, ‘’The Traffic in Photographs’ art journal, vol. 41. 1981. • Barthes, Roland and Annette Lavers. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print. • Berger, John et al. Ways Of Seeing. Print. • Campany, David. Photography And Cinema. London: Reaktion, 2008. Print. • Duhamel du Monceau,. The Elements Of Naval Architecture. London: Printed by D. Henry and R. Cave, at St John’s Gate, for the author, and sold by the Booksellers in town and country, 1754. Print. • Klein, William. Life Is Good & Good For You In New York!. Manchester, England: • Klein, William and David Campany. William Klein. Print. • Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Print. • Steichen, Edward et al. The Family Of Man. 1955. Print. • Szarkowski, John. The Photographer’s Eye. New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1966. Print. • The Sweet Smell Of Success. USA: Alexander Mackendrick, 1957. DVD. • They Live. USA: John Carpenter, 1988. DVD. • The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Translated by J.A Underwood (author) and Walter Benjamin (author), Penguin Books Ltd 2008 • Barthes,R. Camera Lucida. Vintage,1993. • Charbonneau, M. (1999). Symposium: Sartre and Postmodernism: An Encounter Between Sartre and Lacan. Sartre Studies International, 5(2). • The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. (2012). [DVD] United Kingdom: Slavoj Zizek. • Zeitgeist: The Movie. (2007). [DVD] United States: Peter Joseph. • Karakayali, Mehmet Nedim. Simmel’s Stranger. 1st ed. Print. • McCullin, Don and Lewis Chester. Unreasonable Behaviour. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print. • Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949. Print. • Simmel, Georg and Kurt H Wolff. The Sociology Of Georg Simmel. 1st ed. Print. • Conrad, Joseph. Heart Of Darkness. 1st ed. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Library, 1996. Print. • Benjamin, Walter and Howard Eiland. Early Writings, 1910-1917. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.