On the Communal Other: Collaborative Documentary Praxis in Joyful Life

Looking is associated with observation and surveying—mind and emotions are activated. Looking helps to make sense of what is before you. Looking is also necessary for targeting. The answer to the question, “For what reason do we need to make sense of something?”—or, to put it another way, “For what reason do we need to target something?”—is located where power dynamics surface and get played out. Moreover, the answers to these questions are highly culturally and socially inflected, and more often than not become politically driven. Just because my image “type,” revolving around the general figure of the Asian woman, has been historically constructed and propagated by those in a position to do so, and now that I am in a position to create another image, it does not mean that I am absolved from creating another “type.” Therefore, for someone like myself, who has chosen to make creative visual media that resonate with my sensibility and experience, an ethical practice of looking entails asking why and how I am looking for, hence “targeting,” my object of study.