Photography as Care: Haruka Sakaguchi’s Documentary Practice
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
8-3-2025 6:20 PM
Description
Dr. Corey Dzenko, Associate Professor of Art History, Monmouth University, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Photography as Care: Haruka Sakaguchi’s Documentary Practice
Photography’s early uses included the colonial act of collecting people, negating sitters’ humanity to curate visual typographies. Photography’s gaze then often continued to objectify sitters along lines of power. Yet, a number of contemporary photographers use the documentary medium in a more collaborative way, collaborating to a greater degree with the people they photograph. Indeed, the recent research project and pedagogical tool Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2018-2024) works from “the assumption that a degree zero of collaboration is at the basis of the event of photography.” This paper will address the ways in which Japanese freelance photographer Haruka Sakaguchi (b. 1990), who is based out of New York City, uses her more collaborative approach in a generative way that turns her creative acts into acts of care.
In recent decades “the need for care” grew alongside a “contracting supply of it” amid neoliberal constraint (Hochschild). Theorists talk of the “crisis of care” and critique the emphases on hyper-individualism or autonomy. Beginning in the 1980s, the turn to the moral philosophy of the “ethic of care,” which often connects with feminist practice and theory, addresses how, as political scientist Joan Tronto describes, “certain structures of social injustice and inequalities of power and privilege determine how the labour of caring is distributed and who undertakes it.” Tronto defines four ethical and intertwined elements of care as: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. I locate all four elements in Sakaguchi’s photographic work, such as in her series Typecast (2019), I Will Not Stand Silent (2020), and her forthcoming Campu: An American Story (2025), which will showcase portraits and testimonies of Japanese American survivors who were interned in concentration camps by the U.S. government and their descendants. This paper, thus, expands recent discussions of photography as collaboration to include photography as care.
Corey Dzenko, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Art History at Monmouth University. She focuses her research on contemporary art and photography in terms of the politics of identity and place. She was a Visiting Fellow in Art History at the University of Nottingham, presents her work internationally, and has published articles in Burlington Contemporary, Men and Masculinities, and Afterimage. She co-edited Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (Routledge, 2018) and curated the 2024 exhibition I Wish That I Had Spoken Only of It All: Twenty Years of Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say.”
Relational Format
Conference proceeding
Recommended Citation
Dzenko, Corey, "Photography as Care: Haruka Sakaguchi’s Documentary Practice" (2025). Women of Photography: A 24-Hour Conference-a-thon Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025. 15.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2025/schedule/15
Photography as Care: Haruka Sakaguchi’s Documentary Practice
Dr. Corey Dzenko, Associate Professor of Art History, Monmouth University, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Photography as Care: Haruka Sakaguchi’s Documentary Practice
Photography’s early uses included the colonial act of collecting people, negating sitters’ humanity to curate visual typographies. Photography’s gaze then often continued to objectify sitters along lines of power. Yet, a number of contemporary photographers use the documentary medium in a more collaborative way, collaborating to a greater degree with the people they photograph. Indeed, the recent research project and pedagogical tool Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2018-2024) works from “the assumption that a degree zero of collaboration is at the basis of the event of photography.” This paper will address the ways in which Japanese freelance photographer Haruka Sakaguchi (b. 1990), who is based out of New York City, uses her more collaborative approach in a generative way that turns her creative acts into acts of care.
In recent decades “the need for care” grew alongside a “contracting supply of it” amid neoliberal constraint (Hochschild). Theorists talk of the “crisis of care” and critique the emphases on hyper-individualism or autonomy. Beginning in the 1980s, the turn to the moral philosophy of the “ethic of care,” which often connects with feminist practice and theory, addresses how, as political scientist Joan Tronto describes, “certain structures of social injustice and inequalities of power and privilege determine how the labour of caring is distributed and who undertakes it.” Tronto defines four ethical and intertwined elements of care as: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. I locate all four elements in Sakaguchi’s photographic work, such as in her series Typecast (2019), I Will Not Stand Silent (2020), and her forthcoming Campu: An American Story (2025), which will showcase portraits and testimonies of Japanese American survivors who were interned in concentration camps by the U.S. government and their descendants. This paper, thus, expands recent discussions of photography as collaboration to include photography as care.
Corey Dzenko, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Art History at Monmouth University. She focuses her research on contemporary art and photography in terms of the politics of identity and place. She was a Visiting Fellow in Art History at the University of Nottingham, presents her work internationally, and has published articles in Burlington Contemporary, Men and Masculinities, and Afterimage. She co-edited Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (Routledge, 2018) and curated the 2024 exhibition I Wish That I Had Spoken Only of It All: Twenty Years of Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say.”
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