Week 5 Response: War, Part I

Posted by Nara Hohensee
This week, you have a choice between Bernd Hueppauf’s “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” Caroline Brothers’s “Casualties and the Nature of Photographic Evidence,” and Michael Griffin’s “Media Images of War.” Each addresses the relationship between images and war – Hueppauf from a more philosophical perspective, and Brothers and Griffin from a historical perspective.
 
As you consider your reading this week, try to also think about how it relates to the readings we’ve discussed in class so far.
 
OPTIONAL PHOTO CHALLENGE: Use selective focus in your image this week. You might have a tough time doing this with some wider-angle lenses — the trick is to make sure you’re very very close to the object in focus, and that the background is far away. Using your zoom function and zooming all the way in can help too, as will shooting in low light (bright light will make your depth of field much larger). Some cameras have macro settings that allow you to focus on objects that are really close to the lens (iPhones seem to do this automatically).

Week 4 Response: Theorizing the Violence of the Photograph, Orientalism and Identity

Posted by Nara Hohensee

This week you had a choice between three readings: Timothy Mitchell’s “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order” (with an intro to Edward Said by Jae Emerling to help you along); excerpts from Stuart Hall’s Spectacle of the Other; and the intro to Judith Butler’s recent Frames of War. These readings help us consider how difference is performed and represented through photography, and the stakes of those representations. Butler’s piece takes an even more macro view and helps us to question the category of ‘humanity’ in general.

For your response this week, be sure to consider how your photo is engaging with notions of difference.

*OPTIONAL PHOTO CHALLENGE: Use the Rule of Thirds in your photo(s) this week.

Week 3 Response: Theorizing the Violence of the Photograph: Semiotics, Gender and Psychoanalysis

Posted by Nara Hohensee

This week you had a choice between several readings: excerpts from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; two essays from Barthes’s Image/Music/Text; excerpts from John Berger’s Appearances; two chapters from Berger’s Ways of Seeing; or Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

These readings, which draw on semiotics (Barthes & Berger), Marxist thought (Berger), and pyschoanalytic approaches to feminism (Berger & Mulvey), will give us some useful concepts and terms for thinking about how photographs and audiences interact. The authors are all concerned with what images do. How do they communicate to us? How do they affect how we see ourselves and our world? How do they influence how we see their subjects?

For your response this week, think about which concept(s) from the reading you chose struck you as most important for understanding how images affect viewers.

Week 2 Response: Regarding the Pain of Others

Posted by Nara Hohensee

As you read and respond to excerpts from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, pay attention to the various theses that Sontag puts forward about the nature of photography and its relationship to violence. Notice that she presents limited evidence to support her claims. Think about what kinds of evidence we would need in order to test them.

Please respond to this reading with at least one original photograph that you create specifically for this assignment, plus 150-200 words of text that explain how your photograph relates to the reading.

Due: Sunday, 4/7 at 6pm