The Photojournalist
(A Manifesto in Defense of Representation)
by Gabriela Frank
March 13, 2026
(A Manifesto in Defense of Representation)
by Gabriela Frank
March 13, 2026
“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”
- Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
Gilles Caron, Fondation Gilles Caron
A photojournalist
for the times, is what I’ll be.
‘Til the ground is too hot
and they swap my camera out
to tell me: “Take a good shot!”
“That’s what I’m here for!”
I cry from behind
the lines, recoiling
with a shutter-shudder;
a man froze in a–
in the–
flash and drops
out of frame. End scene.
“Would you look at that!”
“He’s not so bad!”
That’s what you get for playing
director
with that phallic camera!
Didn’t you know,
combat drones
see you in high-resolution?
Shklovsky coined a useful term for how artists combat the deadening effect of habit: ostranenie, or defamiliarization. Gertrude Stein uses it in Tender Buttons; Pound preaches it with “make it new.” Stein particularly defamiliarizes language, throwing off the hierarchy that touts the noun and shirks other subordinate parts of speech. Language poet Lyn Hejinian made an astute observation about Stein’s techniques during a talk, acknowledging in the same stride Stein’s queerness, saying that she dismantled “the phallocentric monumentality” of the name. She breaks tradition by forgoing patriarchal naming conventions, which make the name paramount, and instead focuses on common nouns, verbs, and conjunctions.
With the advent of (Western) modernism after World War I, art adapted to the needs of a disillusioned and industrialized society; writers and painters mixed and melted into cubist amalgamations, turning their backs on mimesis (representation). After World War II, the need became even greater, and postmodernism emerged to meet it–and in a more democratized form, which included dissolving the barrier between “high” and “low” art. Regardless, both movements have a heightened sense of awareness toward their form, which occasionally undermines their content. As time moves forward, it feels as though the offspring of the First and Second World Wars and their main actors–the Nakba, Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War–and other global tragedies that could or could not be related–Ukraine, the “War on Terror,” and the crisis in Sudan–require a different kind of publicity. The truth is overwhelmingly censored, and when it breaks out, people often turn away from the graphic reality of true “representation.”
Ostranenie or defamiliarization is self-explanatory in its most common usage–to make the familiar look new through techniques of subversion. For example, Viktor Shkovsky wrote an epistolary novel about love called Zoo, or Letters not about Love, where he ends up yearning for home–Russia–as much as his unrequited love. But I want to posit that what is familiar to us now, in the twenty-first century, is so far from being “true” or “natural,” that to rip us out of our desensitized stupors, we must see the subject drawn, photographed, or written to resemble reality as best as it can–more than ever before.