The Photographs of Dave Mason:
Regarding the Pain and Celebration of Others
Dave Mason takes pictures of public events in Memphis and posts them to his instagram, @fatsodoctor, within a few days of the event.1 Such public events rolled to a stop in March and April 2020 as Memphis banned public gathering due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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1. Fatsodoctor is a childhood nickname he now backs up with a Ph.D. in Theater.
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Then Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on Monday, May 25, 2020 and those throwing themselves at officer Chauvin captured his crime on video.2
Quickly Memphis joined in the national demonstrations condemning that law-enforcement-on-a-black-life violence and all the institutionalized crime that cripples our country. By Thursday, May 28th, Mason had photographs of a silent, peaceful protest that supposedly warranted over 50 officers in riot gear. He captured no physical violence or wounds in his photos. The original activists and overdressed police all headed home around 1 a.m. to start their next work day.
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2. Those trying to protect Floyd are precisely not bystanders. They involve themselves.
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Only since the journalism of the Vietnam War have Americans used photographs of violence as self-criticism. Before that, graphic war imagery was used as positive propaganda (often staged for the earliest cameras after battle). As cameras improved, these images were censored and captioned, again to control what message they sent about the increasing harm Americans faced in battle (and dealt to other people). As the Allies photographed the ends of prison camps in World War II, they used the gruesome images of corpses again as propaganda, this time to justify the wasteland that now was Germany and England. Post-1970’s we can now look at reasonably “objective” violent images and read them as condemnation of war in general (which is incredibly fast, lethal, and senseless). They can also be used to send completely different messages when framed with enough text.
I have not watched the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. Nor the video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery. I have, as a brief moment in a documentary, seen footage where police officers brutally kick Rodney King. That is enough for me. Dave Mason’s photos are never graphic like those videos. However, I find that I am constantly having the same conversation with myself when I scroll to a protest picture on instagram that I do when I see a headline that will lead to one of those graphic videos: “Can I see this right now?”
As Susan Sontag writes about graphic images from war in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, “in each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering”.3 Referring almost exclusively to war images that depict maimed soldiers and non-combatants, Sontag theorizes that in order to interact with photographs of graphic violence, we must choose the production of two exclusive roles: one can either don the costume of a viewer and stomach this violence, or one chooses not to view, and instead must wear a coward’s costume (One cannot not opt out of performativity).
I have not watched the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. Nor the video of Travis McMichael fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery. I have, as a brief moment in a documentary, seen footage where police officers brutally kick Rodney King. That is enough for me. Dave Mason’s photos are never graphic like those videos. However, I find that I am constantly having the same conversation with myself when I scroll to a protest picture on instagram that I do when I see a headline that will lead to one of those graphic videos: “Can I see this right now?”
As Susan Sontag writes about graphic images from war in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, “in each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering”.3 Referring almost exclusively to war images that depict maimed soldiers and non-combatants, Sontag theorizes that in order to interact with photographs of graphic violence, we must choose the production of two exclusive roles: one can either don the costume of a viewer and stomach this violence, or one chooses not to view, and instead must wear a coward’s costume (One cannot not opt out of performativity).
3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. (New York: Picador Modern Classics, 2003), 5.
While Mason’s protest photos are never gruesome, there is a gruesome neglect and oppression as the impetus for each protest he captures. Some events are explicitly for Floyd and against police brutality.4 Others are for the Memphis Bus Riders Union, immigrants’ rights, or the Fight for $15 (promoting a $15 minimum wage in Memphis).5 There is pained trauma behind all of these, where we let our laws do violence to people and their families in many ways. So I argue that even without capturing violence and death explicitly, protest photos also force us to contend with the two roles they conjure, the coward and the spectator, as Sontag theorizes.
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4. Dave Mason, George Floyd Deserved Better "Justice" Demands It !!!, May 31, 2020, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
5. Dave Mason, Memphis Bus Riders Union "Demand Transit Justice", January 21, 2019, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
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5. Dave Mason, Immigrant, October 22, 2018, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
5. Dave Mason, I AM A Man #FightFor$15, February 13, 2018, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
One “advantage” (among the crushing stressors) the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA has brought to the Black Lives Matter Movement is that it has virtually silenced all other extracurricular activities and news. Now privileged Americans must contend with these two viewer roles much more often and closer to home, and the result is that more Americans now can stomach these images long enough to say like they did during Vietnam, that American policies are causing this violence and are not creating peace in the process. Privileged Americans are taking on the spectator role more frequently with protest photos.
6. Sontag, 98.
Sebastião Salgado, Migrations: Humanity in Transition. (New York: Aperture, 2000). 7. Sontag, 100.
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What a photographer needs to achieve in creating a good “spectator” is one that will mourn with the protesters pictured and believes the fight can be won through actions. Susan Sontag illustrates a poor example of this with the black and white migration photos of Sebastião Selgado taken in over 35 countries and published in 2000.6 They are incredibly cinematic, they have an immense depth of field, and they are perfectly composed to the point that they become paintings. The problem with these photos of suffering is that, “with a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder”.7 Compassion can move mountains, but grandiose images can also overpower compassion.
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Instead what you want is a photo on a relatable, human scale, like Mason’s shot from June 23rd.8 Taken from eye-level, an arm’s length away, the woman in the foreground invites the viewer to read her shirt, to take some time to spectate (and thus bring that spectator role into being). Her shirt invites the spectator to join the fight (“stop criminalizing black children”). But that’s about it. This picture says this protest is YOU sized. It has a pace you can keep up with and a relatable human shape. Heck, the woman to the left proclaims even, “your location is not a limitation”.10
Which brings me to another of Sontag’s crucial points. As a photographer, bringing an “anti-war” spectator into being is simply not enough. Even the coward role can be anti-war. That role will catch a glimpse of the protest image, turn away, and condemn all the violence that foments that protest. But this viewer never actually spectates, and does not keep compassion and will power in balance the way a good spectator role will. Instead what Sontag wants is a spectator who takes into consideration time and place. Susan Sontag actually opens her essay using Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas critique of war that came in 1938 in regard to the Spanish Civil War. Sontag explains, “To read in the pictures only what confirms a general abhorrence of war is to stand back from an engagement of Spain as a country with a history. It is to dismiss politics”.10 The effective protest picture creates a spectator role that can take a specific ideological stance rooted in the place where it acts. This picture with the t-shirt slogans creates a spectator who has a specific view (violence comes from us criminalizing black youth) and knows how to act upon it (by wearing a similar t-shirt, face mask, staying hydrated and joining a protest). In addition, Mason’s photos gathered in this show all come from Memphis, a place with a long and specific history of criminalizing black youth. Memphis sent its photographer Ernest Withers from Memphis to Sumner to witness the trial of Emmett Till's killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Memphis ran the Staple Singers family, which included teenaged kids, out of town fearing for their lives.11 And today Memphis plays its fair share in every other form of racial violence.
10. Sontag, 9.
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11. Greg Kot, I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway. (New York: Scribner, 2014), 96.
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Dave Mason’s protest photos show not one but a variety of political entry points to Memphis’s protests, and he is rather egalitarian about it. Each rally varies in size and length, location and activity, but he generally gets portraits of individuals and small groups in each crowd, putting each event on equal standing regardless of the effect a particular action garnered. Frankly his protest photos are on the same plane as the public event pictures he started taking soon after The Women’s March in January 2017.12 Those include the Christmas parade downtown and Dia De Los Muertos festivities at the Brooks Museum.13 If a viewer can imagine being just behind two sets of shoulders standing slightly above them on the curb at a concert shown in a photograph, what’s to stop this viewer from conjuring a role in a similar position in a protest they agree with?14
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12. Interview with Dave Mason.
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13. Dave Mason, Memphis Christmas Parade, December 17, 2019, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
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14. Dave Mason, Woman Playing Guitar, Sept. 27, 2019, photograph, size variable, Memphis.
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I may not feel at ease creating a spectator role by looking at a picture of a 3C rally in town (Coalition of Concerned Citizens - an activist group fighting illegal police surveillance). They are veteran activists with a longer and deeper relationship to law enforcement than I know how to navigate. But a queer community bike ride and car parade I can envision participating in. When he shows us so many angles to activism in Memphis, it is hard not to create a role that fits one and not to want to join them at least once.
This is not to say Mason has unanimous approval. Like a good spectator a photographer keeps in balance a host of issues- privacy versus publicity of protesters, gendered voyeurism, consent to be photographed in public, just to name a few. Like Sontag claims, one isn’t spectating if one is not taking into consideration local politics and history. And local politics and history inevitably conflict when you take them all into consideration. One has to make choices. One has to take stances. One has to face being wrong down the road. You will see an occasional retort on Dave Mason’s photos about how he has made those choices in a captured instant.15
This is not to say Mason has unanimous approval. Like a good spectator a photographer keeps in balance a host of issues- privacy versus publicity of protesters, gendered voyeurism, consent to be photographed in public, just to name a few. Like Sontag claims, one isn’t spectating if one is not taking into consideration local politics and history. And local politics and history inevitably conflict when you take them all into consideration. One has to make choices. One has to take stances. One has to face being wrong down the road. You will see an occasional retort on Dave Mason’s photos about how he has made those choices in a captured instant.15
That is a concrete example of “engaging” with the local politics of a place. You’ll also be able to rank photos with the most likes. This can demonstrate both the approval of other activist instagram users but also point to the shapeless and nearly useless approval of many who have opted for cowards’ roles in viewing his pictures.
In closing, Susan Sontag reports from Virginia Woolf’s 1938 argument that she detests the premise that kicks off her essay, “How are we to prevent war?”16 Men incite and wage war, she puts forth. How dare they drag women into finding the solution to the destruction they keep restarting?17 Similarly it is unfair that the Black Lives Matter movement must advocate for basic safety in America. And it is unfair that every minority group must rally behind the activist movements pictured in Dave Mason’s catalog to heap enough disapproval upon the men committing the crimes and those making the policies.
16. Sontag, 4.
17. Sontag, 5.
17. Sontag, 5.
Though it is unfair that “we” must be dragged into Mason’s spectator roles, “we” anti-police-violence citizens absolutely have to be dragged into this fight to end it.
Donating, protesting, and supporting your local activists are the only ways to continually keep the coward and spectator roles vying for your participation when you look at protest photos. And it is only the constant tug that will keep us asking, “Can I see this right now?"
Donating, protesting, and supporting your local activists are the only ways to continually keep the coward and spectator roles vying for your participation when you look at protest photos. And it is only the constant tug that will keep us asking, “Can I see this right now?"
When we donate, protest, and support our local activists we keep the muscles warm that will let us go out and celebrate when we are vaccinated against COVID-19. Dave Mason began taking pictures after the Women’s March. We will celebrate amidst pain again not too far in the future. In the meantime, we have work to do.
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Reading cited:
Kot, Greg. I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway. New York: Scribner, 2014.
Selgado, Sebastião. Migration: Humanity in Transition. New York: Aperture, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador Modern Classics, 2003.
Kot, Greg. I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway. New York: Scribner, 2014.
Selgado, Sebastião. Migration: Humanity in Transition. New York: Aperture, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador Modern Classics, 2003.