Whose Representation, Whose Rights?

This article is based on a conference the author co-organized at CELSA-Sorbonne in 2018 entitled, “Médias indépendants et droits de l’homme: la tension entre ‘reporting’ et ‘reportage’? Enquête et démocratie” (“The Independent Media and Human Rights: Tension between “reporting” and “reportage”? Investigation and Democracy”). The conference featured presentations by independent photographers NnoMan Cadoret and Yann Levy and Le Monde reporter Rémi Barroux. It focused on how independent and “traditional” photographers and journalists represent human rights issues including police violence and discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation and how they cover activist movements such as “Truth and Justice for Adama,” the movement formed after the suspicious death of Adama Traoré in 2016 while in police custody and the ZAD (zone à defendre), an autonomous zone in Northwestern France that has had a historically tense relationship to the French state. This article takes as its central questions those posed at the 2018 conference: How do independent photojournalists and journalists, those working for “traditional” outlets and independent cultural producers contribute to investigative and democratic practices? How do these groups represent and, in the case of independent photographers in France, sometimes themselves embody precarious and vulnerable lives? What complementary knowledge can they provide to the academy and to scholarship? Describing the ways in which Cadoret’s and Levy’s documentation of what they call “a permanent social emergency: the migrant crisis, institutional racism, the destruction of the environment, liberal reforms” (Levy 2017) is a form of social and political engagement, the article details their conceptualization of and commitment to representing under-represented and misrepresented vulnerable populations such as residents of the quartiers populaires (working class neighborhoods), migrants and residents of the ZAD. Explicating the distinct ways in which their interpretative community (Hymes 1980; Zelizer 1993; Nichols 1994) as committed independent photographers differs from that of Le Monde journalist Barroux, this article addresses both how these independent and “traditional” media producers conceptualize what Ryfe (Ryfe 2019) has called the single greatest challenge facing Western journalism today: its ontology (Ryfe 2019). Cadoret’s and Levy’s work is then analyzed in the context of the independent American documentary “Whose Streets” (2017), about the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson uprisings. To what extent independent photographers and cultural producers creating counter-hegemonic representations could be considered a sensus communis (Rancière 2009) is one of the concluding questions of this work as is the challenge to self-reflexivity and self-critique in the academy concerning questions of representation and precarity.