Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary

a Camera Obscura book

by Pooja Rangan

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this vicious circle is the result of immediation , a prevailing documentary ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and animals. She focuses on multiple examples of documentary subjects being invited to demonstrate their photography workshops for the children of sex workers in Calcutta; live eyewitness reporting by Hurricane Katrina survivors; attempts to facilitate speech in nonverbal autistics; and painting lessons for elephants. These subjects are obliged to represent themselves using immediations—tropes that reinforce their status as the “other” and reproduce definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing. To counter these effects, Rangan calls for an approach to media that aims not to humanize but to realize the full, radical potential of giving the camera to the other.

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 2017

Reviews

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely insightful as a critique of humanitarian aesthetics and dominant documentary values. The turn late in the book to nonhuman questions and a valorization of formal "surrender" extends the argument to breaking point, risking valuing noise over sense in the attempt to escape unsavory positions of power (and thus potentially equating nonhuman with non-sense instead of making space for the minds of others). That said, the level of risk here is part of what makes it so alive.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book brings up many fascinating issues with the state of documentary from the inception of the craft to today. Some moral dilemmas I was already aware of. Others were new to me. The use of fictional stories as examples was a confusing choice when discussing the documentary field, but what most troubled me was the lack of suggestions on solutions. Many problems were explored, and nothing of substance was suggested on how to solve them.

[Ash]

peak duke university press