A self-analysis of my book Postcards from Zambia.

First, let us make no bones about it, photographs from page 80 to 93 are purely aesthetic photographs, for tourists and animal lovers. I do not delude myself that they contribute to the photography canon anything very much in particular. But my name is not Walker Evans and Peter Langmead is not going to entice critical photographic comment from the great critics of the world, if any remain.

However,  now let us look at some of the other photographs. Subjects eyeballing the camera are generally associated with advertising photographs that emphasise high lifestyle and luxury that belong to the reader by postmodern right, according to Baudrillard. I think he is right and it is easy to see what my subjects are advertising, freedom from western simulacra and real standards of living in rural Zambia! Well, some have complained about this, portraits looking at the camera, almost with the sfumato of Leonardo da Vinci, eyes questioning the reader.

The better educated would reflect on the 'gaze', or rather the so-called averted gaze of the oppressed that is of course naturally, or not so naturally, extended to colonialism and feminism. I am sikisty, 60, and I have indeed seen averted gaze, most usually in deference to chiefs, politicians and tyrannical thugs, but nothing now to do with colonialism. This is not surprising today, since the colonial era was way before nearly all post-colonialists were born, even if the academics who continue to rant about such things are still supported by Western universities and remain comfortably a long way from their often still tyrannical homelands. While Africa continues to blame the colonial West for all its ills, colonialism itself has been superseded by  globalisation and neo-imperialism, by everyone else in the world: the Chinese build roads and are looking very colonial in their settling habits, remembering that colonialism is state-sponsored settlement in foreign countries. Anyway, despite all this, the fact is that Zambians look to me to be far from oppressed and the state of their country cannot really be blamed on anyone else any more.

The book is social documentary. David Bate puts it so well when he says in his book Photography, The Key Concepts, documentary 'constructs a victim for its always privileged audience in terms of class, ethnicity, gender or other social category, [...] and the dignity of the subject [...] is not guaranteed by any particular viewer'. This continues to be true: the big camera nearly always has a neo-imperialist or tourist at the controls, capturing images of reportedly suffering poverty stricken Zambians, and then the pictures vanish off to the neo-imperialist state, the home of the photographer, where they may be used for erroneous decision-making about aid and development funding, or published out of context in newspapers.

What Bate does not mention is that this is actually Foucault's panopticism: the victim never gets to see his photograph just as the prisoner does not see his guard. As well-meaning as selling the book in Zambia may be, Zambians do not have to buy it, so may be the prisoner does not want to see his guard. Now the irrelevant question is, why should he? If you have problems with Documentary Photography because of this tarred brush, you can do Street Photography, which is the same thing but without the discipline of the narrative that so offends post-moderns. Or can we just refer to it as opportunist photography, 'snapping' in the vernacular?

Martin Parr said he did not like smiles. I took his advice in some cases because big ones are indeed exhausting on the wall. Some are wide-angle shots, which means the photographer is unavoidable close to the subject, so the subject cannot possibly miss the photographer taking the photograph, unless of course the subject is asked to ignore the photographer. I do not approve of this strategy; it is in my view posed and fake. I prefer the captured bemused smile, almost Mona Lisa; it is more honest and genuine.

While the documentary may be scowled at by postmodern academia and practitioners, it would be a great shame if the social history of nations is not recorded because of the dysfunctional philosophy of a predominantly European privileged few - let us say positively rich and more than three standard deviations above the global mean - that was determined over the rims of too many cups of Fairtrade coffee.