Wells "Surveyors and Surveyed"

While reading the chapter “Surveyors and Surveyed” by Wells, I was interested in what she had to say about the documentation of ‘exotic” cultures and how the camera was used as “an instrument of symbolic control”. It upsets me reading about how colonial people used their ability to travel around the world and photograph different cultures as an opportunity to pose their subjects and give them a specific and inferior roles in relation to the white man. Wells explains how often times the subjects of these photographs were put in particular outfits and settings to convey a certain message. Also nudity was a tool used by photographers to isolate individuals of other cultures to make them appear as less civilized and more primitive. In our culture of believing what we see in photographs, this act created an ignorant base of knowledge, where people believed they were learning about these different cultures, but were really just seeing them through a specific and skewed lens.  

I cannot help but be reminded of the social experiment/performance art “Couple in a Cage” that was discussed in both my Contemporary art history and Mexican Chicano art history classes when I discuss this subject. In that piece, a male and a female actor dressed up as natives of an imaginary island off the coast of Mexico and were put in a cage on display in various museums. In this act, people were prompted to pay money to take pictures with these “aborigines” or see them perform various tasks. To my astonishment, many people did believe that the actors were really natives of a foreign country, and did not see anything ethically  wrong with watching them and dehumanizing them. Some people were very upset by the concept of caging humans and a few were skeptical of the reality of this situation, but not nearly enough. This goes to show that the fascination with “primitivism” is not dead and the concept that seeing is believing still applies today. Although “Couple in a Cage” is performance art, it was inspired by the exploitative photography produced by colonial peoples. I believe that we as a culture need to challenge our perception of images a bit more these days, especially since it is easier than ever to manipulate photographs and create elaborate false messages.