On The Use of the Disabled in Photography

Week of 10/10 – 10/16

My roommate is in an Emerson’s history of photography class, and he was showing me some examples of work one night. After seeing a selection of photos, I made him stop at one that showed a Chinese man in a wheelchair. The photograph was taken by a man named Victor Chin, and apparently he contributed most of his work to an exhibition that focused primarily on disability in photography. After doing some research on my own, I encountered his web blog entitled “A Digital Awakening”. His pictures are primarily taken with a positive outlook on disabled culture, which isn’t always the case when viewing disabled artwork. There are pictures of what I assume is himself sitting in wheelchairs and trying to do things that normal people can do, like getting on the subway. My thoughts of a positive spin of the disabled drifted to the extreme opposite, where I have encountered the disabled in a negative light in photography. What I thought about were the many circus flyers and posters that take someone’s disability and change it into enfreakment or unnaturalness.
In The Disabilities Studies Reader, chapter 37 deals with the oppressiveness of the disabled in photography and what that represents as a culture and for our society. David Hevey explains that there is a constructed oppression toward disabled photography. Either they are represented in the work as “meaningful or meaningless bodies”. And he goes to say the disabled is only meaningful if they serve to convey polarized anchors of naturalist humility or terror. Basically, as long as they are trying to show the truth about disability, it doesn’t matter what light they are shown in. Famous artists, such as Arbus, Winogrand, and Mohr, only use the disabled as a subject to flesh out their thesis or embody the work. And to this matter, Hevey says its as if these photographers’ spirits can be summed up as pure manipulation of the disabled person’s image. The problem lies in the fact that the disabled “emerge like a lost tribe, to fulfill a role for these photographers but not for themselves.
Throughout history, disabled people’s role solidifies the “weird” against the “norm”; they are used as a symbol of enfreakment or the surrealism of all society. It is only through progressive works of art, or in this case, photography, that we may see the oppression of the disabled break their representational stigmas of fear, loss, or pity, and replace it with notions of hope and normalness.