In the context of the picture the closed eyes can be interpreted as a form of blindness, an invitation to indulge in the purest form
of voyeurism - the object being unaware of the observation, defenceless. However the longer one looks at the picture the more one becomes aware of oneself
and the personal components of looking. In contrast to a real life situation like this where the observed person is unaware of the observer, the woman’s
expression seems to suggest a certain knowingness so that although the mirrors to the soul may be veiled and we have to live with the ambivalence, the
wearer of a hand of Fatima is in any case protected from the injurious gaze of others.
The final picture in the work group is Shangri-La which can also be read in the context of the discussion on tourism, stereotypes
and fantasy geographies above. What the work group as a whole appears to do, to a greater or lesser extent, is something we can never do in reality -
to photograph the past in the present. |
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 The
suggestion here is that pictures which activate stereotypes are a class of “static” pictures, imbued with an ahistorical stillness which is apparent
only to the makers and their cultural peers. The insistence that many other cultures are “as they were in ancient times,” “biblical” etc. reveal not
only metaphors but cultural prescriptions. To this mind set, therefore, a photograph can be an image of the past, a photograph back into history in a
way supplementary
to its own dating. By re-presenting aspects, objects and people from images in the anthropological tradition Ponger examines their current significance
and continuing power as well as the function of photography in that context.
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