GOOD MEDICINE

Photography as a discipline emerged at an historical moment that witnessed the birth of what French situationist Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle.” This phrase refers to an evolution of capitalism characterized by a commodity culture simultaneously privileging image, display and visuality (Abigail Solomon-Godeau 1992). Noted American photography critic Susan Sontag said that the photographic image has the power to capture and transform an individual into an object that symbolically can become the possession of another (1977). And Edward Said (1978), among others, has argued that colonial powers have used photography strategically to represent non-Western peoples as an exotic Other, in order to achieve political and economic dominance (Robert Hirsch 2000). This use of photography as a tool for collecting evidence and writing colonial narratives has become known as photo-colonialism, and the goal of the Good Medicine project is, at least in part–  designed to usurp this tradition.