Manipulation Ethics Response, Charlie Stern

My first thought, with the Henri Cartier-Bresson quote, is the idea of “when.” I’d say I grapple with it more than “why.” I’m a self-taught photographer, and I’ve been able to photograph a variety of pro-wrestlers, burlesque performers, sex workers, cosplayers, comedians, and other friends who do me the favor of being my subject (like when I’m prepping for wedding/engagement shoots). I discuss this with my grandmother, whose uncle and father were photographers, and we’re always talking about the mystery of “when,” in my own photography. As in, what happened before? What is implied about a backstory? What does time look like before this moment? Oftentimes in my work, people are wrapped in tulle, or covered in fake blood. How did we get to this point, and why did I choose the final photographs I did? (A Crewdson-esque liminality, perhaps.)

It brings me to ethics. I could very well be creating a Lewis Powell moment. 

I am often creating a fiction with real people, and, for the longest time, I was very anti-editing. If I wasn’t able to capture the best light in the moment, then, I thought, I didn’t deserve to crank up the warmth, for example, when shooting during golden hour. 

But, more importantly, I’ve had to write people out of my portfolio, and out of the canon of my life. It feels extremely weighty when I’ve done something like create images for a fellow artist that are then sold (real life example: t-shirts) and then that artist is revealed to be an extremely harmful person off stage. 

Paul Pfeiffer wrote Marilyn Monroe out of the canon of her own life, and benefited from it. Hugh Hefner did as well. All her life, and even more so in her death, which is infinite, she’s been stripped of agency. (Aside: Should men create art? The answer is overwhelmingly no. They clearly can’t be trusted with it.)

I’m always thinking about how to represent my subjects in the most honest, yet most surreal way. We’re creating a different universe, but they’re not bodies. They’re not characters. They’re the story itself. I don’t think it would be unethical to start creating heavily digitally manipulated art, or even paintings that take place in a different world entirely (see: Janet Bruesselbach’s otherworldly paintings of trans women), as long as the subject maintains agency. 

Laura Mulvey writes about the male gaze in her foundational work of film theory, and I think about my firstyear Film Theory class (over a decade ago), where we were shown extremely blunt and extremely subtle examples of objectification and, no matter how a woman, for example, was chopped up or zoomed in on or used as furniture, the message was always clear: Object. Not subject. We watched The Women (1939), with its all female cast, and the tag line “It’s all about men!” Lamps, all of them. 

I think I’d be creating unethical art if I were to do something like chop Marilyn Monroe up for parts, write her out of the narrative, or non-consensually publish pictures of her in a porn mag and get buried next to her after all the trauma, betrayal, and torment. 

Writing someone out of a narrative, robbing someone of personhood, using them as an object — Those things are more like excessive airbrushing of women, celebrating the absence of a woman, leaking nudes, creating deep-fakes with the intention of causing fear and panic in the public — those things are a completely different animals than Jerry Ueslmann combining negatives. 

And I would say that I feel “Harvest Of Death” to be a robbing of the dead’s agency, but I also do find it important to take very honest looks at things like war, poverty, incarceration. This one’s hard for me. The issue here is that there are victims who may not be consenting. Dignity seems to be what I come back to. 

When? And who are they? Every human being has inherent value and agency. As an artist, and as an anarchist, I believe that to be true, and I let that guide me.