Editor’s note: The Commons will be running interviews with authors, artists, and filmmakers through 2024. For this third installment, editor of The Commons, S Brent Rodriguez-Plate spoke with Ellen Armour about her book Seeing and Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and Social Justice.
The interview here has been edited from a 45-minute zoom conversation.
S Brent Rodríguez-Plate: I’m thrilled to be talking with Ellen Armour and talking about her latest book, Seeing and Believing, Religion, Digital, Visual, Culture, and the Struggle for Social Justice. Thanks so much for being with us today and chatting with “The Commons.” So, Dr Armour, can you start by telling us about the perspective from where you’re writing, something about where you teach, who you teach, who you’re writing for, and something about your social location?
EA: I am teaching at Vanderbilt Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. The Divinity School is a progressive school in the South. We certainly send a lot of our alums to traditional congregational ministry or chaplaincy, but we also have several students who go on to work for nonprofits for social justice issues. I’m white and cis-gendered, I identify as lesbian, and I also have been very much shaped by my education at Vanderbilt, which is where I did my MA and PhD back in the day. And being in a place like Vanderbilt that was committed to issues of social justice even when it wasn’t always realizing its vision at times, really shaped who I am, what I do, and what I write.
SBRP: In Seeing and Believing, at the close of the introduction you talk about “cultivating ways of seeing that open us up more deeply and regularly to images that affect us emotionally and beyond normalized ways of seeing.” What are some of these normalized ways of seeing and what can we do? What can we do to see differently?
EA: It’s more than how we interact with photographs; it’s how we interact with each other. I anchor Seeing and Believing in what I call a photographic storyline. In this book, you’ll notice there are no simple photographs at all because I learned from Signs and Wonders that it is quite an ordeal to get photographs and get permission to use them. That took an additional year. I also really did want to anchor it in the photographic storyline that was launched by the murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. That particular murder and the multiple killings of young black men and black women that happened over those years and continue to this day was the keystone that launched the Black Lives Matter movement which became one of the largest global protest movements in the history of the world. That’s big.
On the other hand, Dylan Roof went online, prompted by that murder, and googled Black on Black crime, and the response to what he learned sent him down this deep rabbit hole and radicalized him. That led him to go to Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and kill nine people. And that in turn inspired a person in New Zealand to go to a mosque and livestream something similar, killing all the worshippers in the mosque. I don’t know more of a dramatic example of the different ways that we see than that.
And if you think about Trayvon Martin, think about the role that the selfie of Trayvon played in the Black Lives Matter movement. What motivated George Zimmerman to kill him was seeing a young Black man in a gray hoodie in a white neighborhood. It became a kind of iconic image. How many people did you see pose in that same image with the grey hoodie and take their selfie and say, “I am Trayvon.” They would do that online and they would do that at the protest. I mean, President Obama did that.
You can see right there, the kind of back and forth between, on the one hand, this is what we’re trained to see as white people, right? When we white people see a young black man in a gray hoodie, we think of criminality. And that’s not just about the grey hoodie and the young black man, it’s just kind of generally young black man, period. And yet that image itself can prompt us to reclaim it, to do something different with it. And, doing something different with it, it can become iconic. If you look at that image, the word iconic is itself, a religious term. It has that kind of religious feel to it too.
SBRP: Yeah, this is the sense of icon as in “to be like,” from the Greek. It’s like dealing with whiteness, it’s a striving after it. We had Michael Jordan years ago and the Nike slogan was “Be Like Mike.” Using iconic language and of course iconic imagery for Michael Jordan. There are things we want to imitate in the world, and certainly the world needs better images and circulation, and that can and will change.
EA: Right, a lot of that research shows that still photographs can have that kind of moral impact while videos don’t, and that’s an interesting distinction to me. What is it about still photographs that’s crucial, right? Dylan Roof’s selfie was also a crucial piece of it too. He took a selfie of himself in front of a fireplace holding a gun with the Confederate flag, and posted that with his manifesto and he’s just looking right at you like, “You got to decide where you’re going to stand in this.” And his goal was to promote a race war. It wasn’t just to go kill these people. He wanted to recruit others to that same perspective.
SBRP: I’ve been trying to think about this for my teaching about visual arts and film, and how we look, how we see. And it’s certainly not only this generation of students who are in college right now, it’s for myself as well: there’s a change in my attention span, a change in my ability to concentrate for some time, and so that practice almost becomes a religious practice to sit and look at an image for a while.
How does this relate to our religious practices? If we’re invested in our local synagogue, our local church, mosque, or temple. What can religious traditions add and does more of an emphasis on the arts help with traditions themselves?
EA: What I do with Seeing and Believing is turn to religious ways of seeing as helping us navigate the complexities of what I call our new visual public square. Most of the photographs that we encounter these days are digital photographs, made with a cell phone camera, which we all now carry around in our pockets, that we encounter on social media. Most of us get our news from Facebook and social media, virtual places, and the combination of the challenges of digital photography and the affordances of it are powerful. One of the things it’s done is it has effected our attention span. We just go and flip through our social media accounts, and we might look at an image or notice it, but we know we don’t spend much time with it as a rule.
We just go right on by looking for the next high. That’s not accidental. We call it our public square, but it is a privately owned square and what does it want? It wants our eyes on things—not for too long because they want it on the next thing. After all, that’s how it’s monetized. The issue is the way we’re used to looking at these images has effected our attention span.
One of the reasons I turn to religion and ways of seeing is because religion has been wrestling with the relationship between seeing and believing for a long time. But also, specifically, religious ways of seeing, I talk about this practice as a kind of photographic asceticism, if you will. And if you think about asceticism, it’s a kind of discipline. The reason that seeing and believing matter is that we go back to iconic photographs, and we go back to icons. For religion, it is a question of whether or not what we see has a religious significance: Is it a channel to an opening to the divine? Or an idol, an icon, or an idol?
Christ Pantocrator from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai.
And if it’s an icon, then the point would be to spend time with it so that you make that connection between what’s larger than yourself and the way you understand divinity, etc. The second way I think religious ways of seeing can help us, as I argue they can, is by thinking back to the storyline of the image. The storyline can be anchored in something that really kind of reinforces anti-Black racism, and I turned to religious ways of seeing that are not about “race”—there’s not a direct attack on racism or direct response to racist ways of seeing at all. But what religious ways of seeing do is they disrupt the hierarchy of seer over seen and each one of these images does that. That’s also really crucial because the issues are not just about racism, they’re about any kind of hierarchical view. How we see trans people, how we see immigrants, how we see any number of “others” that don’t fit the standard norms, having a way of cultivating ways of seeing, cultivating a practice of asceticism.
In an ascetic practice, the first thing is to slow down and look. And then if you’ve got these repertoires of ways of seeing that you can mobilize, that can help you see differently, see more deeply into a photograph that really catches your eye, then this seeing can disrupt the normative order of things.
SBRP: Yes, there is such an importance to anti-racist work being done in communities and religious communities and schools, divinity schools as well as colleges, and in these, there is a need for a visual anti-racism that becomes a part of our structures of education. This seems to be critical. I think your book, Seeing and Believing, really helps us along in those ways to think about how this matters, how these images and ways of seeing matter.
EA: Religions have been wrestling with this question forever and they all come to different conclusions. I mean, take Christianity, a tradition I work in and it’s launched in some ways by a crisis of seeing and believing: what do we make of an empty tomb?
And of course, then there were many other controversies over seeing and believing that unfolded after that. These are found in multiple traditions, and they must be understood as not isolated from culture, from all the different ways that we’ve been acculturated to see, to think, and to perceive, and that’s true of the visual repertoire that I offer in this book. I didn’t come up with these things. I have to give a big shout-out here to David Morgan at Duke University, and particularly in his book The Embodied Eye, which is where they come from. What’s key is all of them do that disruption of the hierarchy of seer over seeing.
SBRP: Where do we go from here? Where do you go from here? Will you continue looking at images? I wonder if there’s an interest or a thought about looking at other media, moving images, etc.
EA: I am still interested in photography. I thought maybe I’d get rid of my obsession with photography with this book. I’d be done with it. But what I’m thinking most immediately is focusing on another social justice issue which is the controversies over LGBTQIA issues, and in particular trans issues because again, seeing and believing is crucial to that too. What do we think we see when we see somebody that we don’t perceive as non-normative in terms of their gender expression? It is another place where this is a matter of life and death.
How many trans women, particularly trans women of color are murdered every year? Or denied access to gender-affirming medical care, which is happening right here in my state of Tennessee. That’s going to be a death-dealing impact of legislation.
So, how do we see? What I want to do this time around is look at and dig a little bit deeper into how images are deliberately and carefully crafted, not just photos that are just shot by your cell phone camera and posted online but how artistic images might work to help us navigate this complicated issue too.
And of course, religion is going to be a piece of it too. This is sort of providential in some ways: what I think I’m going to look at as a kind of initial artifact at least for this is a relatively new documentary that came out called “Wonderfully Made-LGBTQ+ R(eligion).” It is about the history of Catholicism with regard LGBTQIA issues, and it concludes with a powerful photographic art exhibit. The producer and the director of the film sent out a call for auditions in Los Angeles where there are lots of great actors. They were particularly looking for actors who identified as LGBTQIA in some way and who exemplify diversity in other ways, particularly ethnic diversity, racial diversity, etc., and who had some experience with Christianity, ideally Catholicism, but it didn’t just have to be.
“Wonderfully Made: LGBTQ+R(eligion),” Publicity photo, 2022.
And they had, I don’t know thousands of actors audition, and they selected a relatively small number of those folks. They brought them in and posed them in ways that were deliberately modeled after kind of very iconic high art paintings of Jesus. But they also modernized it a bit so you can recognize the pose. They have a cross, or they are wrapped in white, and have in some cases rainbow flag tears coming down their faces. Or, there’s a rainbow of light on them shining from above. I mean, it’s pretty remarkable.
So, there’s the film and then the photographic exhibition and one of the things that is so cool about the film is they interview several Catholics who’ve been impacted in one way or another by this history and one of the interview subjects is a Catholic priest who identifies as gay himself, and he’s Black and he talks about his own experiences. At the very end of the film, they show him hard copies of the photographic exhibition in a big album. You don’t see the photographs themselves—you just see his reaction and it’s astonishing. You see the transformative power of these images on somebody who’s had this life experience. They show the director having conversations with the actors, either during the audition or post-audition, I’m not quite sure . . . it is also powerful to see the actors as they are.
For that photographic exhibition, I’m thinking about the work of a friend and colleague, Alia Al-Saji, she’s a Muslim Merleau-Ponty scholar in Canada and writes on visual imagery. She has written essays on the experience of walking through a gallery that featured Muslim women in the hijab and talks about it from a Merleau-Pontyian perspective.
SBRP: Oh, that would be a great project.
EA: I’m thinking about using that work, I mean, you’re not walking through a gallery in the same way—that’s gonna be a different kind of experience—but these are art photographs, and you can spend time really looking, slowing down, and taking advantage of these religious ways of seeing by really looking at what these images show you, and think about how that particular kind of ascetic practice might help. Not just to help LGBTQIA people, particularly trans people, right? That’s a key piece, but also to help straight, cis-gendered people who might identify as Christian who might see trans people differently through this other way of seeing.
If they spend time with it . . . there’s something about that. I mean, there are plenty of other examples online that would be useful for the same kind of thing but now it’s going to be explicitly religious, explicitly Christian, LGBTQI focused. And very highly crafted and much more artistic and I want to think about what that might offer to us that could be different, could be the same. That’s where I’m headed next.
SBRP: Thank you for your important work it continues to inspire us.
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Dr. Ellen Armour
Dr. Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Feminist Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School (and Graduate Department of Religion) where she directs the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. Her research interests are in feminist theology, contemporary continental philosophy, and theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability, and embodiment.
In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2016), Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem Of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006). Her latest book is entitled Seeing And Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Columbia University Press, 2023).
