Oldal 34 [34]
32
Dagnostaw Demski
Going further, this perspective means that to perceive something, to recognize
a thing, is to recognize a difference between it and some other thing or some other
perception. Things are thus defined by and through their differences. Another way
of saying this is that human thought is relational. We perceive and think in terms
of relationships—and difference is a relationship (Rapport & Overing 2003: 105).
If human thought is relational, then the perception of difference is also related
to the category of otherness, and both—difference and otherness—result from
building a community. Following Claude Levi-Strauss (1963), we can say that
community describes the arena in which one learns and practices being social. In
this sense, creations of difference and images of otherness are products of a process
of exclusion. The category of difference organizes the picture of reality, indicating
its major elements and the hierarchy of their importance. From the perspective of
showing what was dominant and how it was presented in a manner characteristic
for a given period of time, visual representations seen in the context of their own
age gain another dimension, especially when we additionally compare them from
the wider spatial perspective of central and eastern Europe but also over the period
of a century filled with changes of global and local significance. Such an approach
allows for a number of conclusions to be drawn, which I assume as a starting
point for the discussion of the visual description of the reality, with the help of the
category of difference, mostly based on the example of photography in the years
1945-1970 in postwar, socialist Poland.
‘The category of otherness is one of the important issues in anthropology, of
which a variety of aspects have been discussed and analysed, most often in the
context of a groups’ conviction about its own superiority and the inferiority
of others.” Visual representations that articulate ethnic differences between us and
the Others appear in situations in which cultures meet; when such categorization
(us-them and the differences between these groups) gains increased significance.
‘These categorizations form structures of alterity characteristic for the given time
and place and, as forms of knowledge, they often have a stereotypical character, in
which case they represent the ideas of otherness.
Apart from what is common—the presentation of the two sides and the chang¬
ing degree of gap or distance—there are also other elements that may be treated as
parameters worth taking into consideration: (a) describing the sides, or reality in
general, by way of difference; (b) focusing on the axis of the dividing line (differen¬
tiating criterion); (3) exposing the degree of gap or distance between the observer
and the observed (position of the observer); (d) presenting the medium itself used
to present the difference (transparency), its material side, including technology and
human factors—that is, strategies of immediacy; and (e) revealing (uncovering) the
level of contact with/separation from reality (production of the real).
> See e.g. Claude Levi-Strauss (1963), Zygmunt Bauman (2004), Edward Said (2005), and Homi Bhabha
(1994).