5.21.2007
Reality Stinks
Christopher Way believes that by leading tours through the biggest slum in Asia (Dharavi in Mumbai) he is able to "show it for what it is—a place where people are working hard, struggling to make a living and doing it in an honest way." While it may seem ghoulish to tour such poverty stricken places, Way believes he provides insight into what can often seem distant to our overly sanitized Western existence. He also argues that he and his business partner are "trying to dispel the myth that people there sit around doing nothing, that they're criminals."
It's easy enough to take a moral stance against him, as many in India have, and yet one might be inclined to recall the How the Other Half Lives effect, where photographer Jacob Riis went through the slums of New York in the 1890s shedding light on the previously unspeakable (and unimaginable) conditions facing their citizens. His work initated real social change, even if it was rife with racial biases, voyeurism, and ethnocentrism. Things get even greyer: Way donates 80 percent of his intake to development projects. People in the humanities have the fear of surveillance pounded over their heads so often and so well, that anti-visuality has almost become reflex. Is there any time when it's okay to pry, even to objectify? What about when the supposed "objects" can actually use this to improve their own agency? Is it really better to have no contact whatsoever with the smelly realities that keep capitalism chuggin' along? Who does it serve to keep them hidden? What good does it do to maintain a person's "dignity" if the person literally lives in shit?
