This week our readings tackle the theme of societal or personal remembrance and memorialization. Two of your options have to do with remembering the Holocaust (Hirsch and Baer), while Feldman’s piece talks about the possibilities for ethnographic research to respond to, document, or engage with violence or post-conflict societies.
This is your last reading response! I hope you make it a good one!
Optional photo challenge for this week: make a reference to typical Western iconography.
The theme for this week is photography’s capability to “Otherize” subjects – often under the guise of scientific or bureaucratic investigation or documentation. Two of your reading choices – excerpts from Tagg’s Burden of Representation and the articles by Apel and di Bella – have to do with photography and criminality. The Edwards reading concerns photography’s application to anthropological research.
As you read this week, try to make connections back to other conversations we’ve been having in class. Does this mode of photography differ from war photography or social documentary in fundamental ways, or does it give rise to similar questions?
Optional photo challenge this week: use iconography in your image.
This week you have a choice between Martha Rosler’s seminal essay on documentary photography, and a chapter from Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance. Both authors point out the problems with using photography as an instigator of social change, but they come to different conclusions about how its power can and should be harnessed. This is partly because they’re writing from different contexts: Rosler is an artist; Linfield is an academic.
Whichever you choose, please remember that I’m looking for your photo and your explanation to contain some kind of thesis regarding the reading.
Optional photo challenge this week: use color or contrast to affect your composition in some way.
For these responses, I’d like you to start thinking even more deeply about how you create your images. Your image for this week (and the following weeks) should strive not just to ILLUSTRATE something about the text you read, but to ARGUE something regarding what you read. How does a photograph “argue” something? Can it persuade us? These are the questions I want us to delve into in our photo practice.
This week we’re still considering war photography, but we’re taking it into the digital age, thinking about recent conflicts and how they’ve been presented in the media (Griffin and Brothers both address these issues). You also have the option to read pieces by Baudrillard or Zizek, who both exemplify the post-modern attitude toward the relationships between media and politics.
Optional photo challenge for this week: use leading lines!