A Picture Worth A Thousand Words

The landscape of capturing a photograph has radically evolved over the century. Formerly occurring as a planned undertaking depicting posed appearances, now offers an unconstrained and impulsive liberty to encapsulate an ‘in-the-moment’ feeling. My passion for art and photography compelled me to visit the Frieze Art Fair held in Regent’s Park this weekend. As I walked past the carefully curated, diverse and unique exhibits, I stumbled upon a striking photograph titled, ‘The Merchant of Venice, ’ by Kiluanji Kia Henda. I stood there in awe of how an image could capture the vast complexity and diversity of timely and untimely. This image sparked an interest in the amalgamation of word and image to explore the multifaceted interface between photography and literature. The intersection between these two forms of communication shed light on the historical representations that influenced Kia Henda to capture the image, while raising some important sociopolitical issues of time, place, identity and race in the play.

Born in Angola, four years after it gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, Kiluanji Kia Henda, centers his exploration around the complex postcolonial situation in the present Angola, a nation that battled for its oil assets during the Cold War, and quickly thereafter suffered a brutal civil war. The enduring clash between mankind's history and the present situation of the social orders in the contemporary world is in this manner a focal subject for Kia Henda. Similarly, the ways history and setting gets portrayed in Shakespeare’s Venetian play, The Merchant of Venice, represents the complexities when approaching the constructions and representations of religion and race. Henda is focused on challenging the false notions derived from the philosophy identified with the introduction of European countries and racial legislative issues in relation to black individuals, the “Moors. ” This ideology has spread across the world, where ancestral culture is twisted by the creative ability of mass culture. The photograph captured a black male figure positioned in the dead centre of the frame, standing on a pedestal in the interior of the ‘Istituto Veneto per le Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. ’ The male figure is a Senegalese musician, who, like other immigrants, is compelled to acknowledge any job that comes his path to simply survive, even at the expense of the famous, “pound of flesh. ” The man’s face gets camouflaged with the dark onyx background and the only contrast seems to appear from his multi-coloured striped outfit. The shades of the fake leather bags seem to mesh with the cream and the dark colours of the intricately detailed Italian pillars.

The portrait photograph almost seems framed as the pillars act as the sides of the frame depicting the contained and oppressed Jews. Taking into account the focus on the background and the juxtaposition with his colourful outfit, it seems as though the man has lost his identity and trying to create a new one by standing out. This represents the theme of identity and race in the The Merchant of Venice which is a complicated issue that runs throughout the play. The man seems to represent Shylock and his identity as he is on multiple occasions referred to as “Jew, ” when Antonio sarcastically refers to him as, “Hie thee, gentle Jew, ” or even the Duke of Venice says, “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew. ”

The Senegalese man is symbolic of the outsider, the minority of Jews that Shylock represents. In the 16th Centuery, when the play was written, Jews were treated with extreme hatred and disgust, which contributed to Shylock’s famous monologue, “He hath disgraced me, and/hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, /mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted/ my bargain…I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? … If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. ” The antagonist starts by expressively reminding the Venetians that all individuals, even the individuals who are not part of the majority culture, are human. A Jew, is endowed with the same physicality as any Christian, and is in this way subject to feeling similar agonies and solaces and feelings. Even though at first, the audience identifies with the Jew, whose privilege to reasonable and tolerable treatment has been so ignored by the Venetians, the speech is not an invitation for the Christian’s to recognize their enemy’s humanity.

Rather than utilizing motivation to lift himself over his adversaries, Shylock conveys a monologue that throws him in a less sympathetic light as he promises to “better the instruction”. While we comprehend his agony, we cannot ignore the strive to perpetrate such villainy. Christopher Marlowe's theatrical representation of Jewishness in The Jew of Malta, performed frequently in the early 16th century, has certainly been inspired the structure of The Merchant of Venice. Queen Elizabeth’s doctor, Roderigo López, a Portuguese Jew, was blamed for endeavoring to poison his mistress and was put on trial. The presence of strong anti-semitic racial propaganda at the time led to execution and was celebrated throughout the country. The Jew of Malta was restored at the Rose Theater and widely performed. Despite the fact that Marlowe may have expected his play to be a satire of the political scenario, its Elizabethan producers gained by its merciless anti-Semitic stereotypes. Marlowe's Jew, Barabas, has few saving graces. He is more revoltingly and less sympathetically drawn than Shakespeare's moneylender, voracious, and a traitor who turns on both the Maltese and the Turks. While, similar to Shakespeare, Marlowe has his Jew character articulate his hatred at his inferior treatment by the ‘privileged’ Christians, there is presumably where the viewers’ sensitivities are planned to lie. With such deep-rooted anti-Semitism values present in the Elizabethan era, it seems astonishing that, as opposed to Marlowe, Shakespeare implies that if the Jew is cruel and villainous, indeed, it is because of being mistreated by the Christians.

This theme of minorities and race is recurring throughout the play as observed in Act 2 when the Prince of Morocco comes to win Portia, “I would not change this hue/ Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen”. “Except” proposes that, if Portia were to require it, the Prince would in actuality “change his hue” or convert his black skin into a fairer tone. This attests the possibility that race and skin is malleable by evading the “burnished sun, ” the “Moor” could just fix his complexion. An African Prince has to apologize for his complexion to a woman who is lower in stature than he is. The Prince is willing to go to the extent of changing his complexion in order to be accepted. Even though Portia is disdainful of the prince, his graciousness is impressive. At the same time, however, the prince's speech stands out as being more formal and eloquent than the speech of other characters in the play, which makes him even more of an outsider.