threshold
Each photograph in this ongoing series is a milagro token to carry with us across the many bridges between accountability and compassion.
Three years ago I imagined a photograph - in it I was holding hands with the man who repeatedly raped and abused a dear friend throughout her adolescence. The image was haunting and invigorating because it humanized a man I otherwise saw solely as a monster.
During this time, I, along with two other women very close to me, had been suffering with eating disorders. This photographic vision supplied an alternative to the fear and devastation of abusive behavior, whether that behavior is directed at someone else or towards oneself.
Over the last two years I have been working with men convicted of intimate partner abuse in order to create this image. I use Polaroid Type 55 film so I can give each participant the polaroid image at the end of our session, while keeping the negative for printing. The process is such that we are literally peeling the positive from the negative. This is our offering.
The photographs are not meant to condone abusive behavior, rather, they support our capacity to heal the part within each of us that is capable of hurting ourselves and others.
The work is directly inspired by:
- my colleague & friend, Don Chapin, director of Crossroads Community Nonviolence Program, who has worked with abusive men for over 30 years as part of the movement to stop violence against women and children, particularly in native communities;
- by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, notably psychiatrist and writer, Pumla Gobodo Madikizela's work with the apartheid's commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads, Eugene de Kock;
Gobodo-Madikizela writes: "But for all the horrific singularity of his acts, de Kock was a desperate soul, seeking to affirm to himself that he was still part of the human universe."
The Threshold series was recently published in Gates of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination, edited by Barry Lopez & Frank Stuart, University of Hawaii, Summer 2008
All rights reserved © Kate Joyce 2010. Contact about usage rights and/or purchasing prints.
