Within this work lies a sense of accusation that is aimed at the viewer; an accusation that highlights a disaffected but loving set of relationships…

Poverty is a trap from which millions of people across the globe attempt to escape on a daily basis. It causes death, extreme pain, mental stress and emotional heartbreak for both those that leave in search of work and for those that are left behind.

What binds the departed or the burnt ones together is the drive to live a dignified life, the drive to provide a life worth living for their families, and the faith that they too can secure a united future with hope (Barrada 1999). When existence alone is constant torture, desperate acts of survival are performed and as part of the journey – not to a new identity, but to a life of no identity – death becomes a familiar final destination.

When existence alone is constant torture the “self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, and occupies a space much larger than the body” (Scarry 1988). In extreme circumstances, the extension of the self becomes a political referent that needs to be erased, hidden, or literally exploded. A body extended, out of place, is regarded as less than human and rendered nameless and, by extension, not real.

People that GO NO GO (Denderen 2003) break with the convention of being cast as docile bodies for industrial consumption; they cause chaos by refusing to disappear. They stay in focus by generating new hope in the idea of a promised land (see Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s film Promised Land, 2011). When a body acts, or calls out against extreme conditions of pain, it represents a threat and “must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in a state of deadness” (Butler 2006). It is at this juncture that the body becomes a symbolic marker of human failure and consumption.

The body’s expanded space through the critical situation of poverty and pain has devastating effects on all those who see the body and refuse to act. In this moment, humiliation is not reflected in the face of the abjected subject but in the face of the passer-by or the audience. It is in our moment of passing, or our refusal to acknowledge human need, that the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the unemployed, the desperate and the mentally ill regain their humanity, because when we walk by those in need they become charged with a Medusa-like power that turns our gaze to stone. With each negation, we become harder.

When the abjected subject spills over into sanitised spaces, they cause rupture and generate resistance. These people become the spillage for a neo, anthropological study that surfaces in the presence of a culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno 2003). It is when unwanted tortured bodies become larger than the space of their bodies that we render them and, by extension humanity invisible. The notion of how and in what context a body is on display becomes a critical contestation.

When existence is constant torture, the human body is at its most vulnerable to being symbolically framed as pathetic. Viewing the pain of others from a position of privilege, pleasure or power does not guarantee empathy, but it does create the conditions for a regurgitative ideological merry-go-round on the nature of the image as spectacle and compassion fatigue.

At the crux of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photography lies a critical and self-proclaiming response to the cultural baggage that has been dumped on her and her immediate family. Within this work lies a sense of accusation that is aimed at the viewer; an accusation that highlights a disaffected but loving set of relationships that are at times literally laid bare for us to observe. The black body in Frazier’s work is a resilient signifier that refuses to become invisible even if America’s corporate steel companies no longer require this body. The body through the work of Frazier takes on new work. It performs the past in the present and laments that lost space. Through the construction of a photograph, the image in focus is collapsed into the now.

If the unwanted human body keeps on occupying spaces – by refusing to be laid bare and by being brought into view (by for example Frazier’s photographs) then the unwanted cannot be coded out of society or transformed into mere historical numbers. History has taught us that when the human form is transformed into a number the consequences are disastrous: we lose sight of our humanity and kill with ease. Our focus becomes schizophrenic as we withdraw from the reality of the situation and construct utopias or fantasy politics based on notions glorious or imagined pure pasts.

The bad old days of struggle to exist become the good old days of today. This is because the present is so horrific for many of the world’s people as they increasingly become city dwellers and expand unofficially the city’s borders and boundaries. “When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organisation of state power and emancipation from it.” (Agamben 1998). This leads us to the inevitable questions of how one arrests the development of a condition in which the machinery of progress operates at an unstoppable and all-consuming pace? How much human life rendered as waste is acceptable and what then is the role of the photographic image when regarded as a recycling tool for a life long lost? What part do we play collectively in the demise of our own emancipation and of our own futures, either as victims or advocates for change, if we do not take action beyond a zone of reflection?