If you think about why any story moves us, it’s because of a quaking moment of recognition.
It’s never the shock of the new, it’s the shock of the familiar.
— Joshua Oppenheimer
What is a photograph?
The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing… but an awareness of its having–been–there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction of the here-now and the there-then.
~Roland Barthes
~Roland Barthes
In our culture of pictures, the gaze itself flattens into a picture and loses its plasticity. Instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina. David Michael Levin uses the term 'frontal ontology' to describe the prevailing frontal, fixated and focused vision.
~Juhani Pallasma
Susan Sontag on the role of the photographed image in our perception of the world:
• it is a mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs
• the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera
• the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.
Images, Power, and Politics
sturkenandcartwright_practicesoflooking.pdf | |
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the photograph
All images have two levels of meaning:
- The creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing, and personalization.
- Despite this, photography has historically been regarded as more objective than painting or drawing.
- The combination of the subjective and objective is a central argument about photographic images.
All images have two levels of meaning:
- The denotative meaning of the image refers to its literal descriptive meaning.
- The connotative meanings rely on the cultural and historic context of the image and its viewers.
- The term myth, as used by Roland Barthes, refers to the cultural values and beliefs that are expressed through connotations parading as denotations.
- Myth is the hidden set of rules and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality specific to certain groups, are made to seem universal.
Manipulation of Images
Pick up a magazine aimed at women and, even though it’s hard to tell, most likely the cover has been retouched or digitally altered. The use of software programs to change photographic images has become so commonplace that many of us don’t realize or recognize it. “Unattainable Beauty,” Newsweek 2010, takes a look at a decade’s worth of what it says are bad digital photo alterations and provides background on how the original images were changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7143sc_HbU
The dangerous ways ads see women | Jean Kilbourne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy8yLaoWybk
10 Mind Blowing Tricks Advertisers Use to Manipulate Photos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRRUgI_iUXI
Another take on this topic that is appropriate for young women is from Sweden. It invites students to discover how magazine covers are manipulated (http://demo. fb.se/e/girlpower/retouch).
- Who created the image?
- What is the purpose of the image?
- Who is the audience for this message?
- What techniques were used to create it?
Decoding Visual News Content
http://katebrigham.com/thesis/
(2002; http://katebrigham.com/thesis/forMIT/Interface.htm)
http://katebrigham.com/thesis/
(2002; http://katebrigham.com/thesis/forMIT/Interface.htm)
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