Positionality
When I teach drawing, I set up a still life in the middle of the classroom for our first few lessons. The students sit around this assemblage in a large circle, each having a very different view of the composition. My favorite part of this assignment is walking around the room and seeing what my students see. Every drawing is unique and depends on where the student’s body is positioned in the room. Even when I step into their sight line, I must shift myself up, down, and side to side to be able to talk with them about what exactly they are looking at. This foundational perspectival difference is then layered with marks made by each student’s distinctive hand.
When I am in the cemetery, I am similarly conscious of the subjective positioning of my body in the space. I acknowledge the weight that is strapped onto the identity of my body. I am always asking the question,
what is my place in this place?
How and why is my body able to enter this space?
As is always the case, positionality is complex and intersectional. I am a white woman from the United States who carries a vast amount of privilege to be able to travel through spaces of burial. I am welcomed in many countries without questioning.
How do I make sure the way I move through the world carries an ethic of respect and care?
This is an ongoing, as I continually learn to resist neoliberalist narratives and pressures following me.
The position of my camera’s lens constantly shifts with my body, its perspective rapidly changing. I keep every photograph even when they appear to be all the same. Doubling becomes a way of expanding my subjectivity and making space for new ways of looking.
When I teach drawing, I set up a still life in the middle of the classroom for our first few lessons. The students sit around this assemblage in a large circle, each having a very different view of the composition. My favorite part of this assignment is walking around the room and seeing what my students see. Every drawing is unique and depends on where the student’s body is positioned in the room. Even when I step into their sight line, I must shift myself up, down, and side to side to be able to talk with them about what exactly they are looking at. This foundational perspectival difference is then layered with marks made by each student’s distinctive hand.
When I am in the cemetery, I am similarly conscious of the subjective positioning of my body in the space. I acknowledge the weight that is strapped onto the identity of my body. I am always asking the question,
what is my place in this place?
How and why is my body able to enter this space?
As is always the case, positionality is complex and intersectional. I am a white woman from the United States who carries a vast amount of privilege to be able to travel through spaces of burial. I am welcomed in many countries without questioning.
How do I make sure the way I move through the world carries an ethic of respect and care?
This is an ongoing, as I continually learn to resist neoliberalist narratives and pressures following me.
The position of my camera’s lens constantly shifts with my body, its perspective rapidly changing. I keep every photograph even when they appear to be all the same. Doubling becomes a way of expanding my subjectivity and making space for new ways of looking.