Yesterday a door to door salesman came to my house to try and get me to 'sponsor' him in a magazine selling contest. Should he be able to accrue 5,000 points by selling magazine subscriptions, he will receive a trip to Europe. Had I been to Europe? How was it? It sure must be nice.
The pitch had nothing to do with the magazines and everything to do with helping this young gentleman achieve his dream of wooing the continental ladies (I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the exact gist of it.)
The list of magazines to choose from showed about 120 middle-tier magazines, each marked with points rather than a price. Should I choose one title, it would get him 350 points closer to his dream. Another gets him only 200, and so on. The value in making the purchase had nothing to do with what the value of magazine might be to me and everything to do with helping this young man get out and see the world. In other words, the magazines had become mere props for a tax deductible donation.
What really happens to the money and to the points is beyond my ability to know, but I do know exactly what the purpose of his visit was. It existed simply as an effort to bait me into subscriptions to bolster the rate base of a series of publications that can't get the boost they need any other way.
To demonstrate just how fubar this exchange is, let's imagine the conversation went in a completely different way.
"Hello sir, I'm a young entrepreneur and I am here to convince you to buy one or more of these fine publications, that will, on their own merits, enrich your life and be worth every penny that you spend."
Yeah, hilarious.
No, the purpose of this exchange was to eke out a bump in subscriptions by any means necessary so these magazines could continue to justify to their dwindling advertisers the value of advertising with them.
But let's look more closely at that. Let's say for instance, that I had decided to take three subscriptions, one for me, one for my wife and one for a gift. Even though I am constantly bombarded with exposure to these titles, I haven't so far subscribed to them. I see them on magazine stands, in airport book stores, in doctors offices, but so far I have felt no need to spend the nearly nothing they are charging for the privilege of having them delivered to me.
In other words, I don't really want them. But I buy them anyway. And thousands others like me buy them too. And the kid gets his trip to Europe. And in large part the magazines are a waste of effort and resources. They sit in my car unread. My wife barely opens hers. I send the gift to my mother, who already subscribes to her favorite titles. The net result here is an utter waste of time. The magazines get made but we're not reading them. At least not in any way that is significant.
But, there was a small success here, right? The publications got that bump in subscriptions that kept them alive another season. Is that a success? I don't care for the publication. I don't read it loyally so I don't see the advertising. The advertisers don't get what they are paying for which is exposure to me. The edit keeps getting watered down to try and keep subscribers like me. And when it comes time to renew, I won't re-up and I won't ever subscribe to them again.
In fact, under one of my car seats right now is a copy of the February 2008 issue of a magazine that I subscribed to on a lark. It was free and it still hasn't been read. But it keeps at least one of my two-year-old children happy as they slowly shred it or stick the pages together with milk and raisins.
The real crime here is in the damage it does to entire industry. I love magazine publishing. It is an amazing thing to be a part of an incredible publication with devoted and loyal readers. Standing next to a massive web offset press as the paper flies through a process almost the length of a football field at a pace that can produce a million books in a 24 hour period has to be one of the marvels of the world. When it is your team that made the book, it is even more incredible. Working all night on an issue to get on a plane in the next few days and find a copy of it in a distant airport... beautiful. Color theory. Design. Market research. Audience loyalty. Good editing. Great photographs. The tactile quality of a well designed product in tune with its readers. All are amazing things.
But dumping your subscriptions masked in a charity case does nothing useful for anyone in the industry. If the kid gets the European vacation, I hope it changes his life. At least some good might come out of it. What I really dream is that he might come back and try and sell me something from a list of 120 magazines that are worth buying outright, just because they are so important to have.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Representing the Unrepresentable: Advertising and Edit Integrated
This is part four in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.
In the complete process of making and distributing traditional documentary photography and photojournalism, there is a series of exchanges that, each building on the previous, culminate in the performance of the images in front of a broader audience. There is first the recognition of an issue, condition or event, then the interaction between the photographer and the subject being depicted (photographs are made in specific times and in specific places), followed by the exchanges between photographer and publication in the editing and selecting of images for release, and then finally the interaction between the audience and the images themselves within the context of a publication. This final exchange is the culmination of all the previous interactions and has the most political impact. Here the image meets the audience, and the exchange determines the net political action of the images in the world.
The primary means of viewing photographs for the public has been through magazine publications first, then newspapers and now online. It is the magazine industry that has most refined its use of photography and lessons learned there can be applied to new models going forward.
To do this let us first establish a means of looking at a magazine as a whole. Any publication can be seen as an aesthetic object; complete, integrated and interrelated, with each page contributing to the overall effect on the reader. We must accept the magazine, newspaper or book in its entirety as an integrated object where advertising and edit are bound together and interrelated. How could it be otherwise, when the editorial and the advertising are interspersed, interlocked, and following similar visual rules? Even though you can flip through a magazine and separate the advertising from the editorial, you are still “reading” it all, and both influence you simultaneously.
The basic purpose of the advertising is to create, identify or amplify perceived deficiencies in the audience that the product or service being advertised can supposedly repair or complete.
Through a series of seemingly pragmatic business decisions, newspaper and magazine publishers have come to rely heavily on advertising for revenue. In a publicly traded publishing company requiring profitability for stock holders, growth targets are set by the corporate leadership, and the cost of missing your quarterly revenue goals can be significant, starting with job cuts and ending with magazine closures. Subscription sales generate very little net revenue, newsstand sales generate slightly more, but the majority of income comes from advertising sales. Magazines have increased this reliance on advertising by offering subscriptions at such low rates that they barely cover production costs, with the goal of increasing readership and thereby raising the advertising rates. With reduced subscription prices come market devaluations of the edit itself, and a need for broader appeal to try and retain casual subscribers who picked up the subscription on impulse. To put it bluntly, the editorial pages exist as a kind of bait, to bring in readers in numbers that generate a profitable advertising rate base.
Continue reading with Part Five.
In the complete process of making and distributing traditional documentary photography and photojournalism, there is a series of exchanges that, each building on the previous, culminate in the performance of the images in front of a broader audience. There is first the recognition of an issue, condition or event, then the interaction between the photographer and the subject being depicted (photographs are made in specific times and in specific places), followed by the exchanges between photographer and publication in the editing and selecting of images for release, and then finally the interaction between the audience and the images themselves within the context of a publication. This final exchange is the culmination of all the previous interactions and has the most political impact. Here the image meets the audience, and the exchange determines the net political action of the images in the world.
The primary means of viewing photographs for the public has been through magazine publications first, then newspapers and now online. It is the magazine industry that has most refined its use of photography and lessons learned there can be applied to new models going forward.
To do this let us first establish a means of looking at a magazine as a whole. Any publication can be seen as an aesthetic object; complete, integrated and interrelated, with each page contributing to the overall effect on the reader. We must accept the magazine, newspaper or book in its entirety as an integrated object where advertising and edit are bound together and interrelated. How could it be otherwise, when the editorial and the advertising are interspersed, interlocked, and following similar visual rules? Even though you can flip through a magazine and separate the advertising from the editorial, you are still “reading” it all, and both influence you simultaneously.
The basic purpose of the advertising is to create, identify or amplify perceived deficiencies in the audience that the product or service being advertised can supposedly repair or complete.
Through a series of seemingly pragmatic business decisions, newspaper and magazine publishers have come to rely heavily on advertising for revenue. In a publicly traded publishing company requiring profitability for stock holders, growth targets are set by the corporate leadership, and the cost of missing your quarterly revenue goals can be significant, starting with job cuts and ending with magazine closures. Subscription sales generate very little net revenue, newsstand sales generate slightly more, but the majority of income comes from advertising sales. Magazines have increased this reliance on advertising by offering subscriptions at such low rates that they barely cover production costs, with the goal of increasing readership and thereby raising the advertising rates. With reduced subscription prices come market devaluations of the edit itself, and a need for broader appeal to try and retain casual subscribers who picked up the subscription on impulse. To put it bluntly, the editorial pages exist as a kind of bait, to bring in readers in numbers that generate a profitable advertising rate base.
Continue reading with Part Five.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Representing the Unrepresentable: Compassion and Empathy
This is part three in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.
Throughout the history of the human race, empathy has served a complex and difficult to articulate role in helping one person to assess, evaluate, or understand the nature of another's existence. Empathy has evolved to operate between people who are in physical proximity and therefore are capable of processing the huge volume of cues, both rational and irrational, that culminate in an overall sense of the condition of the other. When we are physically present with another person, a relationship is possible and empathy can serve a number of purposes in establishing and enhancing that interaction. Empathy evolved as a function of person-to-person contact.
We photographers frequently see ourselves as standing in for that physical interaction. If we insert ourselves relationally into the physical space of the subjects, we can carry the viewer with us and thus give the subject visibility and a public voice. However, when the subject is connected to the viewer through a photograph, the audience response becomes problematic. The empathic cues within a photograph are limited. There is not enough information to form a more complete perception of another person or group. Photographs also vary widely in their emotional content, and in a single series of photographs made in a short period of time of the same subject in the same location, it is possible to make images that vary widely in terms of the data that they communicate empathically to the viewer. Even within the relatively narrow constraints of straight photojournalism and documentary photography it is possible to make work that achieves a wide variety of emotional outcomes and it is frequently in the editing of the images where the specific emotional tone and argument of the image series is refined or clarified.
Through photographs we are not relating to whole people or places but to fragmented depictions of them, dislocated in time and space. These fragments of self, presented as photographic evidence of the human condition, perform for the audience on a spectrum ranging from the specific political to the general mythic. In this case the word ‘political’ is synonymous with the word ‘real’, it being a descriptor of actual events, people and places that exist in real time and are interconnected in real, if not easily depicted or understood ways.
Again, it is the nature of empathy itself that is the problem here. Evoking compassion is something that should be done with specific care for the political interaction between the image and the viewing audience.
Empathy as practiced from person to person offers the potential for human relationship, interaction and intervention, all under the influence of the empathic person. Empathy that is mediated through a photograph requires no avenue for action, and in fact the images may obscure the political realities, or point the viewer in the wrong direction, creating an environment where the viewing public is bombarded with empathic information in a media environment where meaningful actionable political responses are unavailable or obscured.
Most humanitarian documentary photographers and photojournalists will say that their intent is to reduce social injustices. The conventional wisdom is that by exposing audiences to photographs of injustice and inequity, they will be motivated towards compassion and will act to direct material or political aid towards those in need. The chief flaw in this strategy exists not in the audience or in the plight of the subjects but rather in the evidence and accuracy of actionable response to the images.
Events and problems of a global nature are created and sustained by complex human systems that resist easy interrogation. Solutions are pushed forward by specifically targeted political pressure. Merely raising awareness offers only the hope that the audience will find and create that pressure on its own, or that outrage will fuel further investment into inquiry and response. While these do occasionally happen, they are not reliable or even likely outcomes for many if not most of the problems that we face.
Continue reading with Part Four.
Throughout the history of the human race, empathy has served a complex and difficult to articulate role in helping one person to assess, evaluate, or understand the nature of another's existence. Empathy has evolved to operate between people who are in physical proximity and therefore are capable of processing the huge volume of cues, both rational and irrational, that culminate in an overall sense of the condition of the other. When we are physically present with another person, a relationship is possible and empathy can serve a number of purposes in establishing and enhancing that interaction. Empathy evolved as a function of person-to-person contact.
We photographers frequently see ourselves as standing in for that physical interaction. If we insert ourselves relationally into the physical space of the subjects, we can carry the viewer with us and thus give the subject visibility and a public voice. However, when the subject is connected to the viewer through a photograph, the audience response becomes problematic. The empathic cues within a photograph are limited. There is not enough information to form a more complete perception of another person or group. Photographs also vary widely in their emotional content, and in a single series of photographs made in a short period of time of the same subject in the same location, it is possible to make images that vary widely in terms of the data that they communicate empathically to the viewer. Even within the relatively narrow constraints of straight photojournalism and documentary photography it is possible to make work that achieves a wide variety of emotional outcomes and it is frequently in the editing of the images where the specific emotional tone and argument of the image series is refined or clarified.
Through photographs we are not relating to whole people or places but to fragmented depictions of them, dislocated in time and space. These fragments of self, presented as photographic evidence of the human condition, perform for the audience on a spectrum ranging from the specific political to the general mythic. In this case the word ‘political’ is synonymous with the word ‘real’, it being a descriptor of actual events, people and places that exist in real time and are interconnected in real, if not easily depicted or understood ways.
Again, it is the nature of empathy itself that is the problem here. Evoking compassion is something that should be done with specific care for the political interaction between the image and the viewing audience.
Empathy as practiced from person to person offers the potential for human relationship, interaction and intervention, all under the influence of the empathic person. Empathy that is mediated through a photograph requires no avenue for action, and in fact the images may obscure the political realities, or point the viewer in the wrong direction, creating an environment where the viewing public is bombarded with empathic information in a media environment where meaningful actionable political responses are unavailable or obscured.
Most humanitarian documentary photographers and photojournalists will say that their intent is to reduce social injustices. The conventional wisdom is that by exposing audiences to photographs of injustice and inequity, they will be motivated towards compassion and will act to direct material or political aid towards those in need. The chief flaw in this strategy exists not in the audience or in the plight of the subjects but rather in the evidence and accuracy of actionable response to the images.
Events and problems of a global nature are created and sustained by complex human systems that resist easy interrogation. Solutions are pushed forward by specifically targeted political pressure. Merely raising awareness offers only the hope that the audience will find and create that pressure on its own, or that outrage will fuel further investment into inquiry and response. While these do occasionally happen, they are not reliable or even likely outcomes for many if not most of the problems that we face.
Continue reading with Part Four.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Blogging the Revolution, How We Could Help.
Baharestan Square and Parliament, Tehran (source: google maps)
To follow the twitter streams coming out of Iran is to witness the birth of a new form of journalism that hasn't fully found its platform yet, but has moved forward into a vernacular territory that traditional journalism avoids. The streams are full of humanity; joy, exhilaration, fear, pain, resolve, despair. It's an incredible form that locates itself somewhere between poetry and journalism, with fact and feeling wrapped up together. I am amazed at the outpouring of support for Iranian bloggers from readers all over the world.
-in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - persiankiwi
Twitter streams are being quoted all over the MSM, with CNN re-posting a number of them verbatim, lacking any other sources to work with. The paradox here is that anonymous sources are the least trusted in journalism, specifically because there is no one to hold accountable for the information. In the case of Iranian bloggers, the anonymity is necessary, but that doesn't remove the problem of anonymity in general. However, the rules are a little different in social media circles. There are people who post regularly through anonymous names but who establish credibility through their consistence and authenticity of voice.
Iranian bloggers are risking their lives to send out information from Iran and we owe it to them to do the most we can to understand and utilize that information in a meaningful way. And they are doing this in the most public of ways through social media. We have to trust that the information that they are risking their lives to send out is important enough to them to send it, and therefore important enough for us to do something with it. Some of the information is general, as in "We have just returned and outside the city sky is full of teh sounds of 'Allah Akbar' from ppls on balconys -" and some of it is more specific, as in "in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - ."
What is lacking is a map that weaves together these social media narratives in a specific way and anchors them in a time and place. Imagine an image stream that would accept cell phone photographs and video with gps data attached and plug them into a google map of Tehran so that protesters with cell phones who have images worth the risk of sending would have a platform for them to be seen in the geographical context of their origin. Imagine an event where images are streaming in with attached gps data, filling points on a map where they were taken, giving viewers on the web a flood of information that is anchored to a specific time and place. Then the maps could be sorted by days and a narrative of events would emerge that has no beginning or end, but is a matrix of information, with photographs overlapping and corroborating each other from multiple sources. It is no longer about the specific image so much as about the flow. This would bypass MSM channels and go straight to the platform from which you would see it. It would be hard for any government to ignore this kind of information.
The technology exists. A lot of the stories and images are already in circulation. It's just a question of how to put them all together.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Persiankiwi is in Trouble
For those who have been following the twitter streams coming out of Iran, persiankiwi has been one of the lead sources of information since the election. So far his/her/their twitter stream has been infused with excitement, potential and hidden dangers, as if these were furtive dispatches in a Matrix like underground resistance, tapping in and out of the web to upload small bits and direct traffic towards some useful end. The violence was in the background and the message was of movement and hope.
And now this today. The blunt end of trauma. The last few hours in chronological order:
There is enough evidence from reports on western platforms such as the BBC to indicate that there are preparations to step up the violence and use the five day extension granted to protest the election results to smash the resistance before Ahmadinejad is finally declared the winner.
Whatever the situation on the ground in Tehran, persiankiwi's reports ring with pathos and clarity. To emphasize just how far we are here in the West from what is happening in Tehran, take a look at PDN's photo of the day.
ed note: I have posted a proposal of how we could create a new platform to help weave together the many narratives that coming out of Tehran through social media. You can find it here.
And now this today. The blunt end of trauma. The last few hours in chronological order:
just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals -The last line sounds like a bendiction. The tone has changed dramatically and if these reports are true, I fear that this a turning point in the revolution. Either the violence just caught up to persiankiwi, or the militia attacks on demonstrators have become much more dramatic. When a government decriminalizes and encourages civic violence towards members of its own population, the results can be horrifying beyond imagination. So far the protest movement tried to position itself as peaceful. But passive resistance only works in the end when the crowd has no stomach to continue the violence. Ghandi won in India because the British public could no longer stand the violence that was being perpetrated in its name. But when the ruling, armed, supporters of the government not only support the violence but actively participate in it, passive resistance will be met with more brutality as in Tibet.
I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war -
they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals
saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - she had no defense nothing - #Iranelection sure that she is dead
so many ppl arrested - young & old - they take ppl away -
ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting - from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys
all shops was closed - nowhere to go - they follow ppls with helicopters - smoke and fire is everywhere
phone line was cut and we lost internet - #Iranelection - getting more difficult to log into net -
rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users - must move from here now - #Iranelection
reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq - now - #Iranelection - Sea of Green - Allah Akbar
in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar -
they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us
they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us -
Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard
we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast -
thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green - pls remember always our martyrs - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar
Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar -
There is enough evidence from reports on western platforms such as the BBC to indicate that there are preparations to step up the violence and use the five day extension granted to protest the election results to smash the resistance before Ahmadinejad is finally declared the winner.
Whatever the situation on the ground in Tehran, persiankiwi's reports ring with pathos and clarity. To emphasize just how far we are here in the West from what is happening in Tehran, take a look at PDN's photo of the day.
ed note: I have posted a proposal of how we could create a new platform to help weave together the many narratives that coming out of Tehran through social media. You can find it here.
Representing the Unrepresentable: The Mythic and the Real
This is part two in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.
Central to the practice of making pictures of disaster, suffering, catastrophe and the large events of our time is photography’s unique relationship to the real. One of the products of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and the concurrent advances in science, is the idea that there is a real world, one that is measurable in distinct times and places. It is empirical and is distinguished by facts and data. This real world also exists separately from the mythic or the general. Photography plays a unique role in bridging these two worlds, trading in both and using one to exert pressure on the other. At no other time in history have we so easily and so convincingly been able to exchange the mythic for the real and back again.
Neither the mythic nor the political are more true than the other. Instead they each possess a different kind of truth—truths that are not interchangeable and do not necessarily lead in the same directions or to the same conclusions. Mythic truths exist in the general sense. For example, in the myth of Icarus, there are truths about the nature of hubris and the dangers of assuming too much of one’s own abilities. However, we would never in a post-enlightenment world imagine the story to be factually or politically true, even though we can recognize the general truths contained in it. Conversely, a Congressional budget report contains great amounts of specific and highly political information that has little mythic value at all.
Since photographs have an indexical quality, on an intrinsic level they cannot be ‘real’ but instead become markers, signposts and fragments of the real. Once a photograph is taken, and it is indeed taken, it is dislocated from its source and becomes a kind of stored data that has the potential to re-impact the real when encountered by a viewer. In the viewing a photograph is realized in its performance for the audience. While photographs are indeed relics and records of the past, they are fixed, and therefore perform perpetually in the present.
Work that serves to make the viewer more aware of this exchange is profoundly political, for it engages the viewer in a process of experiencing a media depiction of the subject matter while drawing attention to the media itself, concurrently drawing the viewer towards an understanding and/or experience of the means and the mechanisms of that viewer-image exchange.
In so far as the real world political realities, both the problems and their potential solutions, from which the images are taken and the subsequent performances of the images for the viewing public are compatible, then the work has achieved a kind of fidelity. As the images steer the viewer towards the general and the mythic, they enhance the dislocated character of the information and can create viewing experiences that are largely removed, both in content and quality, from the real events from which they came. When the subject of such work is traumatic, we have to ask ourselves in a pragmatic sense what is to be gained by depicting it. What are the moral implications and outcomes for the audience who is viewing trauma and destruction? Even more important, what are the implications for the subjects depicted? Is their trauma addressed in any specific or realized way?
Continue reading with Part Three.
Central to the practice of making pictures of disaster, suffering, catastrophe and the large events of our time is photography’s unique relationship to the real. One of the products of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and the concurrent advances in science, is the idea that there is a real world, one that is measurable in distinct times and places. It is empirical and is distinguished by facts and data. This real world also exists separately from the mythic or the general. Photography plays a unique role in bridging these two worlds, trading in both and using one to exert pressure on the other. At no other time in history have we so easily and so convincingly been able to exchange the mythic for the real and back again.
Neither the mythic nor the political are more true than the other. Instead they each possess a different kind of truth—truths that are not interchangeable and do not necessarily lead in the same directions or to the same conclusions. Mythic truths exist in the general sense. For example, in the myth of Icarus, there are truths about the nature of hubris and the dangers of assuming too much of one’s own abilities. However, we would never in a post-enlightenment world imagine the story to be factually or politically true, even though we can recognize the general truths contained in it. Conversely, a Congressional budget report contains great amounts of specific and highly political information that has little mythic value at all.
Since photographs have an indexical quality, on an intrinsic level they cannot be ‘real’ but instead become markers, signposts and fragments of the real. Once a photograph is taken, and it is indeed taken, it is dislocated from its source and becomes a kind of stored data that has the potential to re-impact the real when encountered by a viewer. In the viewing a photograph is realized in its performance for the audience. While photographs are indeed relics and records of the past, they are fixed, and therefore perform perpetually in the present.
Work that serves to make the viewer more aware of this exchange is profoundly political, for it engages the viewer in a process of experiencing a media depiction of the subject matter while drawing attention to the media itself, concurrently drawing the viewer towards an understanding and/or experience of the means and the mechanisms of that viewer-image exchange.
In so far as the real world political realities, both the problems and their potential solutions, from which the images are taken and the subsequent performances of the images for the viewing public are compatible, then the work has achieved a kind of fidelity. As the images steer the viewer towards the general and the mythic, they enhance the dislocated character of the information and can create viewing experiences that are largely removed, both in content and quality, from the real events from which they came. When the subject of such work is traumatic, we have to ask ourselves in a pragmatic sense what is to be gained by depicting it. What are the moral implications and outcomes for the audience who is viewing trauma and destruction? Even more important, what are the implications for the subjects depicted? Is their trauma addressed in any specific or realized way?
Continue reading with Part Three.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Representing the Unrepresentable: A Waking Dream
This is part one in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.
September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Rwandan Genocide, Global Warming, the Genocide in Darfur, Pollution in China, the Collapse of Yugoslavia and Balkan War Crimes, Global Poverty, Local Poverty, Conflict Diamonds, Rape in the Congo, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. These are just some of the recent larger issues that face contemporary life in the west. They are also the subjects of countless photo essays that work to seek some kind of public impact and or political change. The faces of these issues in America are largely based on photographs that present the immediate manifestations and visual evidence of problems that are inherently political in nature. Photographs too easily deal with the consequences while leaving the complex nature of their causes invisible and out of the frame.
Large scale human events emerge out of histories and systems that traverse the globe in messy, complex ways, involving political interactions and structures that we may barely recognize, even though we are directly witnessing the results of their machinations. The photographs of these issues that perform as witness for the public are also created and distributed by systems and structures that are largely invisible, but are responsible for shaping public perception with significant political consequences. At the same time, rapid developments in photo technology have unleashed the production of photographs in numbers that are unknown but that must be in the trillions.
In Wim Wenders' beautiful, epic, 280 minute film Until the End of the World, Dr. Farber has made an electronic machine that can electronically project images directly into the brain, effectively restoring sight to his blind wife. She is able to see with a pair of electronic goggles wired to her head, transmitting video images into her visual cortex. This is an incredible development for her. The characters spend much energy and time bringing video of their shared lives so she can catch up on the visuals that she has been missing.
They soon discover that the machine is also capable of the reverse process. Images can be recorded directly from the brain and played back on a screen for the viewer to watch in real time, making it possible to record one's dreams and then watch them back while awake. Soon, most of the characters find themselves completely addicted to looking at images from their dreams, spending their days watching ghostly pictures on static filled computer screens, peering into real world depictions of their mysterious inner lives while the world outside increasingly threatens with isolation, mass destruction and environmental collapse. When the film was first released in 1991, this seemed like an esoteric tale. Now a mere 18 years later, it is prescient in its understanding of how images can captivate and take us over.
The rapid development of digital technology has made possible the making and distribution of photographs on a scale and in a volume that was inconceivable mere decades ago. We are arriving at another version of Wender’s film, one where we can consume images on a monitor continuously, unconsciously seeking out those images that reinforce our own social, psychological and cultural understanding. Instead of the dream becoming manifest in the real, as it does in the film where dreams are transmuted into pixel data and ultimately images on a screen, we have the real being converted into a flood of images that are disconnected from the political realities of their origins and used to perform in service to other political entities and distribution engines, whether they be magazines and newspapers, social media, governments, individuals, media outlets, or any other entity that finds a use for them.
Rather than informing, a process that often must involve a formal restructuring of information, these images too often reinforce and reify stereotypes and stigmas, even when doing so with the best of intentions. We are entering a period of time where we are collectively joining a kind of waking dream, producing and consuming images at a pace and in a volume that defies reflection. We are swept along, directed by social, cultural and business concerns that, through a process of rewards and punishments, continue shaping the foundations of the way we understand our world. To create new political outcomes in our image making, we must direct change not only to the images themselves, but also to those structures that shape and deliver them.
Continue reading with Part Two.
September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Rwandan Genocide, Global Warming, the Genocide in Darfur, Pollution in China, the Collapse of Yugoslavia and Balkan War Crimes, Global Poverty, Local Poverty, Conflict Diamonds, Rape in the Congo, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. These are just some of the recent larger issues that face contemporary life in the west. They are also the subjects of countless photo essays that work to seek some kind of public impact and or political change. The faces of these issues in America are largely based on photographs that present the immediate manifestations and visual evidence of problems that are inherently political in nature. Photographs too easily deal with the consequences while leaving the complex nature of their causes invisible and out of the frame.
Large scale human events emerge out of histories and systems that traverse the globe in messy, complex ways, involving political interactions and structures that we may barely recognize, even though we are directly witnessing the results of their machinations. The photographs of these issues that perform as witness for the public are also created and distributed by systems and structures that are largely invisible, but are responsible for shaping public perception with significant political consequences. At the same time, rapid developments in photo technology have unleashed the production of photographs in numbers that are unknown but that must be in the trillions.
In Wim Wenders' beautiful, epic, 280 minute film Until the End of the World, Dr. Farber has made an electronic machine that can electronically project images directly into the brain, effectively restoring sight to his blind wife. She is able to see with a pair of electronic goggles wired to her head, transmitting video images into her visual cortex. This is an incredible development for her. The characters spend much energy and time bringing video of their shared lives so she can catch up on the visuals that she has been missing.
They soon discover that the machine is also capable of the reverse process. Images can be recorded directly from the brain and played back on a screen for the viewer to watch in real time, making it possible to record one's dreams and then watch them back while awake. Soon, most of the characters find themselves completely addicted to looking at images from their dreams, spending their days watching ghostly pictures on static filled computer screens, peering into real world depictions of their mysterious inner lives while the world outside increasingly threatens with isolation, mass destruction and environmental collapse. When the film was first released in 1991, this seemed like an esoteric tale. Now a mere 18 years later, it is prescient in its understanding of how images can captivate and take us over.
The rapid development of digital technology has made possible the making and distribution of photographs on a scale and in a volume that was inconceivable mere decades ago. We are arriving at another version of Wender’s film, one where we can consume images on a monitor continuously, unconsciously seeking out those images that reinforce our own social, psychological and cultural understanding. Instead of the dream becoming manifest in the real, as it does in the film where dreams are transmuted into pixel data and ultimately images on a screen, we have the real being converted into a flood of images that are disconnected from the political realities of their origins and used to perform in service to other political entities and distribution engines, whether they be magazines and newspapers, social media, governments, individuals, media outlets, or any other entity that finds a use for them.
Rather than informing, a process that often must involve a formal restructuring of information, these images too often reinforce and reify stereotypes and stigmas, even when doing so with the best of intentions. We are entering a period of time where we are collectively joining a kind of waking dream, producing and consuming images at a pace and in a volume that defies reflection. We are swept along, directed by social, cultural and business concerns that, through a process of rewards and punishments, continue shaping the foundations of the way we understand our world. To create new political outcomes in our image making, we must direct change not only to the images themselves, but also to those structures that shape and deliver them.
Continue reading with Part Two.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Prouty on Iran
Richard Prouty has written an excellent series of posts on his blog One Way Street following and examining the social media coverage coming out of Iran. For thoughtfulness and historical perspective, it is among the best coverage I've read so far. And he is equally nimble with both Twitter and Foucault.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Some Things New
It has been a busy couple of months behind the scenes here. There will be much to roll out in the next weeks and months, including a summer serial for 2009. Stay tuned.
And to kick things off...
New pictures, old pictures, more pictures.
An all new website.
And to kick things off...
New pictures, old pictures, more pictures.
An all new website.
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