On the Photos of "The Space of Boredom" – and What Might Be Missing from the Picture

Abstract

Photography has been, from its early stages, a powerful tool for the anthropologist, both as a mechanical technique to record data and as a heuristic tool used to reflect on the anthropologist's approach as such. At the same time, its iconicity and indexicality have allowed for a different epistemic regime, an allegedly privileged connection to "the facts" or "the truth", in opposition to the written notes of the anthropologist, vulnerable to subjectivity, bias or error. A substantial direction in visual culture studies questions the articulation of image and text, and acknowledges a power relation between the two, as if despite its iconicity and indexicality, photography needs taming by the text that clarifies its meaning and incorporates it in bigger narratives. It is in this context that W. J. T. Mitchell echoes the famous question "Can the subaltern speak?" in relation to photography, asking "What do pictures want?" (Mitchell, 2005, pp. 28-30). It is within this vision of photography as a potential site of resistance to the narrative in which they are embedded that I will try to raise some critical points about Bruce O'Neill's book, The Space of Boredom, by focusing on the photos included in this book.In the subchapter Shelters and the Infrastructure of Boredom, the reader encounters two photos. What we see is the Backwoods shelter, and the two photos reveal the same "infrastructure": corridors with walls covered in (what seems to look like) wood panels, the ubiquitous uPVC doors and windows (termopane) of post-communist Romania and the mosaic tiles reminding of the communist period rather than of its aftermath. There are, however, substantial differences between the two images. While in the first one, the outside world is completely missing, and the light is provided by neon tubes, in the second, the scene is lit from the outside by natural light, creating a contre-jour effect, kept under control to allow us both to distinguish the details of the inside world and to make a sense of the outside world as well. More importantly, the first photo depicts just a long empty hallway, some buckets and cleaning tools breaking the rhythm of the doors, without animating the image, whereas the second picture contains activity: at least four persons of various ages take part in a game of tossing coins. It is the caption that clarifies what the activity is about, and for Romanians of a certain age it will bring to mind a game played in childhood, during breaks at school -Liniuþa. The first photo is typical for a range of images illustrating total institutions, and it reminds of standard approaches to the topic, from Goffman