Bearing "Withness"

by A. D. Coleman

“Only connect! That was her whole sermon.”

– E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

Writing more than a hundred years ago, the British novelist E. M. Forster foresaw the ways in which the technologies emerging in the 19th and early 20th centuries would disconnect us from each other, from the physical world, and from direct experience. Radios, telephones, films, photographs, telegraphs, cars, trains, airplanes, all with their promises to make the world smaller and bring us closer together … yet look at us now, arguably more alienated and isolated than ever before.

“To Belong” serves as the chosen theme for this 2025 edition of an established, annual, collaborative exhibition of work by a cross-section of young Nordic photography students. They have grown up taking for granted the most recent iterations of the technologies whose dangers Forster predicted: faster trains, planes, and cars, of course, but also computers, cellphones, digital still and video images, social media, the internet. From their idiosyncratic responses to the concept of belonging, two recurrent patterns emerge. The first addresses their engagement with others; the second reflects acceptance of their existential solitude.

These polarities represent the unchanging human condition. As Hillel the Elder asked two millennia ago, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?” His questions epitomize our paradoxical human yearning for seemingly contradictory options — community, on the one hand, and independence on the other.

How can one visualize such abstract conditions? Notably, without exception these photographers do not explore their presence in locations traditionally associated with collective experience: home, school, houses of worship, workplaces, public social spaces. And only one one of them engages with the relatively new and increasingly prominent social environment of cyberspace. Instead, they respond with images that describe hanging out with a friend, embracing a lover, communing with nature, contemplating oneself — cumulatively seeking a sense of both physical and psychological place.

The late American sociologist Erving Goffman introduced the useful concept of “the with” to designate the multiple ways in which we send signals of our relationships to everything from people and places to ideas and microcultures. For example, to sun yourself undisturbed at the beach, place a second pair of sunglasses and flip-flops on your towel, and you indicate symbolically that you’re part of “a with” even if you’re actually there alone.

We deploy these signifiers regularly, sometimes deliberately but often out of unconscius habit. Our vocabulary can range from the friendship bracelets exchanged by millions of Taylor Swift fans to the matching outfits in which some pet owners dress themselves and their furry companions, and from romantic partners’ duplicate tattoos to any in-group’s special slang. (One of these photographers suggests, whimsically, that even inanimate objects can signify “withness.”) All of these indicators reflect the fundamental human need to manifest where and when and between whom we feel we share our slice of the world.

Bio note:

Based in New York, A. D. Coleman currently celebrates his 57th year as a critic, historian, and theorist of photography and photo-based art. His blog, Photocritic International, appears online at tinyurl.com/3r4uuynp.