It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja 1996: 10). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja 1996: 31). For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. And what it constructs collapses the boundaries between reality and artifice.Īs such photographic space has much in common with Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace. The camera never passively records but always actively constructs. It is a combination of both spaces that produces something else. While a photograph does have an indexical relationship to space, photographic space straddles the real and the imaginary. The camera lens flattens space, it fetters depth to surface – it transforms a three dimensional space into a two dimensional image of that space. However photographic space is neither a real nor an imaginary space. It was a claim for photography as a Secondspace – the space of the imaginary, where the photographer’s artistic sensibilities took precedence over objective recording. And in an effort to align photography with art, the pictorialist movement used soft focus and lighting effects to accentuate the aesthetic and break with verisimilitude. Concerns regarding framing, perspective and light betrayed an awareness of the deceptions of which the camera lens was capable. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. This is premised on an understanding of photographic space as a Firstspace. Both were a production of photographic space underpinned by a belief in the ‘truth’ value of everything depicted within the camera’s frame. Within this paradigm photographs of colonised ‘others’ were constructed and circulated as examples of colonised people’s primitive status, while portrait photographs of British colonials were seen to display evidence of European society’s advanced status. By providing what were believed to be factual details, photography conspired to persuade the viewer to the concrete reality of the image before them. Much colonial photography participated in a mindset that saw it as a transparent window on the world. The camera permitted a visualization of foreign lands with greater veracity than painting or illustration had previously allowed. In the nineteenth century the British took the camera to colonial outposts and photographed the land, the people and themselves at work and at play. The camera lens demarcates photographic space creating a border that includes and excludes thereby conferring value upon all that is seen through the viewfinder. The camera is a framing device that produces space. For Soja there is no unspatialized social reality, while Lefebvre argues that to change life, we must first change space. Edward Soja claims we are intrinsically spatial beings and active participants in the construction of our embracing spatialities (Soja 1996: 1). According to Henri Lefebvre: “each living body is space and hasits space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space” (Lefebvre 1991: 170). Space gives rise to the manner in which this struggle is experienced as well as our experiences of being. The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space.
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