Since the Oscars aired last weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with one thing and one thing only. Never mind that another wave of the Sars-Cov-2 virus may be sweeping the globe. Never mind that a lunatic with his hands on a stockpile of nuclear weapons continues his mission to “liberate” the people of Ukraine. All anyone can talk about is how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when Chris Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Some people defend Will Smith, saying Chris Rock crossed a line when he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, alopecia areata. Other people defend Chris Rock, saying he was the victim of an assault and Will Smith ought to be charged with the commission of a criminal offence. Some people analyse the incident from the perspective of race. Other people analyse the incident from the perspective of masculinity. Pretty soon, pundits throw so many opinions into the blender that nobody knows where to fall on the matter.
I choose to sidestep the matter altogether by using it to illustrate something about a marginally related concern. The infamous slap is an exchange between two men who are, by vocation, comedians and wildly successful comedians at that. What makes them so successful in their respective roles is that they are unafraid to explore that liminal space between the socially acceptable and the taboo. They do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.
There is no absolute line that defines for all time the limits of acceptable behaviour. It is a matter of perpetual negotiation and most of us rely on others to do that work for us. Like the court jester, Chris Rock’s role is to say things others think but are afraid to utter. He may not always be right, but there is a rightness in the need to drag certain conversations kicking and screaming from their murky corners, like the the conversation about the way the red carpet supports our collective habit of fetishizing women’s bodies.
Candid photography sometimes functions in the same way. The limits of the acceptable shift over time. What stood in the past sometimes deserves to be re-examined today. Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Kiss in Times Square for example. Originally understood as capturing the jubilation of a particular historic moment, it has subsequently been reinterpreted as emblematic of rape culture. What we can say for certainty about Eisenstaedt’s photograph is that it thrusts us into a liminal space and nearly 80 years later continues to engage us in an important conversation.
New contexts demand new conversations. Sometimes it falls to street photographers to use the photographic equivalent of a slap in the face to get them started.
