Photo Play

Here are some of my beginner’s feeble attempts at experimenting with Photoshop for my Media Practices: Concepts class. Several more can be found at my class blog, here.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Dear Mr. President,

In the words of Olivia Newton-John, I love you….I honestly love you. Your address to Congress this evening was masterful, eloquent, and, dare I say it, audaciously hopeful.

XXOO,

Katie

Every Tool Is a Weapon If You Hold it Right

An assignment this past week for my Media Practices: Concepts class got me thinking about artistic ethics, in particular the ethics of photographers in documenting the places and people around them. There are a lot of interesting issues raised when one wields a camera. I remember one of my photography teachers at Penland, the artists community in North Carolina where I’ve taken several summer photography classes, had an Ani DiFranco quotation tattooed on his arm–”Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right”–and he told us that he tried to be always conscious of this idea in his work as a photographer. Indeed, I think that as much as a camera can be a force for great creative production, social good, documentary information, etc, it can just as easily become a hostile object, a “weapon”, a point of division between photographer and subject, between photographer and place, etc. In fact, sometimes I think it’s possible that it can be both simultaneously (think war photography as an obvious example).

The assignment that got me thinking about some of these issues again was one of three options for a photographic exploration. Option number 2 asked the student to take a subway line from one end to the other, documenting your journey, photographic your travel companions in the subway car, on the platform, etc. It’s definitely an interesting idea and I can certainly see the merits. The subway, as several people in the class discussed today when we presented our work, is an interesting netherworld with its own unique atmosphere, behavioral expectations and rules, etc. Our professor encouraged us to approach the project as a challenge, suggesting that by pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zones by doing something that made us nervous or uncomfortable, exposed us to possibly unwanted attention, we might achieve some very interesting and rewarding photographic results, and at the same time expand our comfort zones as engaged artists and individuals. I understood what he meant and it made real sense to me, and, in the process of deciding to go with a different assignment option,  I thought quite a bit about whether my motivations were fear, shyness, cowardice. Ultimately, my decision not to do that assignment option was based on the fact that I don’t like people taking my photograph in public–I feel my privacy invaded and I feel disrespected, violated in a way. I thought about an incident recently when I was in the cafe at Barnes & Noble reading and noticed a man sitting by the wall who was photographing me, trying to be inconspicuous. At first, he was looking straight through the viewfinder, clearly right at me. Once I caught him doing this, he put the camera down on his lap but was still clearly taking pictures of me. I felt uncomfortable and a little angry and moved to an area of the cafe outside of his range (I hope).

Another example I thought of was some of the tactless tourists I’ve seen on various trips I’ve been on, in particular on my trip to China with a class in college. On that trip, we went to some remote and largely rural areas, and along the way stopped at several small villages at which we would all load off the bus and some of the other members of the group would begin snapping pictures of residents of the villages going about their daily tasks. The whole situation made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, and I felt somehow complicit in this sort of elitist, dehumanizing behavior. To me, snapping photos of people who are just trying to go about their business, without their permission, is a real disrespect and, as I say, a dehumanization of sorts. Holding a camera and aiming it creates a power dynamic that I think one always has to be conscious of and careful with. A camera can be a valuable tool, both for artistic expression and for documentation and exposition, but as my former teacher’s tattoo pointed to, it can also be just as powerful a weapon when used in a way that exploits the power inherent in the act of viewing, photographing, capturing. While, of course, I know that there is a difference between the kinds of behavior I’ve discussed and the subway assignment for my class, I think that some of the same issues come up for me when thinking about it.

I do understand the counterargument–I am the last one to argue that political correctness or related considerations should always trump artistic expression or documentary work. And I don’t condemn the choice to complete this assignment. In fact, I thought many of the results were really interesting and many people in the class found different ways to work around these issues and to engage those around them in the process either by straightforwardly asking permission or through more subtle means.

I saw in interesting documentary several years ago dealing with one example of the power of photography and its potential to be perceived as a weapon by those being viewed. The documentary, called Stranger With a Camera, examined the 1967 murder of Hugh O’Connor, a Canadian television journalist. O’Connor was one of many journalists and documentarians to come to Appalachia in the late 1960’s to look at the poverty and isolation of the region. He was shot by the man who owned the property on which he was photographing a coal miner, and the murder encapsulated the two sides of an ethical debate over the documentary photographic process. On the one hand was O’Connor, who considered his work an attempt to bring awareness to the plight of the people of Appalachia in an attempt to bring about rectification of what he saw as the exploitation and neglect of the region and its people. On the other hand was Hobart Ison, who represented the locals who resented the intrusion of these morally crusading outsiders into their community and the stereotyping and criticism they felt subjected to through their lenses. The camera became a weapon, the boundary between these two sides, the use of which was such an affront, such a perceived sign of disrespect and loss of authority that it drove a man to murder. It’s a fascinating story and the documentary raises a lot of the interesting ethical questions I’ve only just touched upon in passing here. I think for anyone working in media, the visual arts, journalism, and really almost anyone who owns a camera, these are interesting issues to at least be aware of and to consider.

Rainy Day Woman

These are some photos I took of my best friend, Randi, for a photography assignment for my Media Practices: Concepts class. A lot of these are different experiments with lighting, framing, etc, which make more sense within the context of the class, so that somewhat accounts for the lack of continuity. Anyway, they’re also posted, with more extensive explanation/reflections on my class blog, if you’re interested. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hot Or Not: Presidents Edition

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." -George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

This new survey out from C-Span asked 65 Presidential scholars to rank the Presidents using ten distinct criteria. I can’t decide which I find more glaringly ridiculous–that Reagan ranks in the top 10 while Bill Clinton trails at #15 or that six other Presidents are ranked lower than George W. Bush. My unofficial poll of one media studies graduate student yielded significantly different results on this point, as you can see above. Despite these facts, and despite the fact that the survey is completely subjective and opinion-based, there’s some interesting stuff, if you care to dig past the Top 10/Bottom 10 lists.

Literacy Through Photography

I know I’ve been horribly negligent and haven’t posted in a week–my semester is off to a hectic start. And I now have a second blog to maintain…and it’s graded. For my introductory production class, Media Practices: Concepts, we are expected to keep a blog as a portfolio of our work, class assignments, and thoughts on things related to the course. A lot of it might be boring or not make so much sense to those outside the class, but some of it will probably be quite interesting and quite relevant to this blog as well, so I’ll probably try to start cross-referencing, in the interest of expediency. In that spirit, here is a class assignment having to do with identifying different lighting techniques in photography. I drew my examples from the work of school children done through programs like Literacy Through Photography and Kids With Cameras. Some of the photographs these children take are absolutely remarkable and while many have the unique creativity and perspective of childhood, many have a surprising depth and sense of knowledge and maturity.

I think the kind of work these programs are doing is really interesting and inspiring and fits nicely within the broader framework of media literacy and media education initiatives. These are exactly the kinds of programs we need in order to empower young people to become producers, not only consumers, of media, and through the process to come to look at and understand themselves and the world around them in different, richer ways. Giving a child a camera, teaching them a skill like photography, gives them a new kind of agency, makes them not only an artist, but a documentarian of sorts, and this is a source of potentially enormous power for these children, now and in the future.

The Winter of Our Discontent

This wonderfully titled post, from the excellent blog of friend of a friend, Kim DeBarge, really hit home for me. As someone who feels that the unwanted and uninvited objectifying messages and behavior that seem to permeate every aspect of the world around me, whether I’m walking on the street, in a job interview, watching a movie, or reading the New York Times, has had a profound impact on the way I perceive myself and the way I interact with the world, and with men in particular, it’s so refreshing to read an intelligent exposition of and reaction to these experiences by another strong, intelligent woman.

“What does it take for me to be taken seriously, both as a woman in general and as myself in particular? Yes, my self is a woman; however, every little bit of nastiness and disrespect towards women that I read has been getting under my skin as of late, and said irritation is both on my own behalf and on behalf of women as a group. I think all that disrespect has an aggregate effect on how I’m presented and interpreted, and it’s not a pretty result.”

This passage, particularly, is such an excellent encapsulation of the kind of thoughts  that pass through my mind pretty much every day and the sense of some combination of frustration, alienation, humiliation, degradation, disappointment, disgust, sadness, and fear that these kinds of experiences evoke in me.

“It is no longer acceptable to hide misogyny behind a character or comic voice; these images circulate in the collective minds of everyone who reads them and have a cumulative effect on our perception of women.”

This is exactly why I find it so important to draw attention to the unacceptable nature of sexism and misogyny when it occurs in the media, even, sometimes, if it seems trivial or is couched in the pretext of humor or irony. For example, the kinds of offensive advertising I’ve highlighted several times on this blog, particularly fashion advertisements frequently hide behind claims that they are simply trying to be provocative, and that the abuse, humiliation, or degradation of women in their advertising imagery does not represent the views of the company, but is merely stylized artistic expression. Somehow, too, things said with a smile or followed with a laugh are also supposed to be excused. Too often, I’ve gone to the movies to see a comedy and found moments of sometimes staggering sexism and gender essentialism slipped in among other, sometimes legitimately funny content, found myself expected to laugh along to the degradation or belittling or stereotyping of a woman on the screen. And if I do not laugh, as Kim discusses, I become a “humorless” feminist. I just can’t take a joke, I’m told. I should loosen up, calm down. As Kim says, I’m painted as “angry” simply for wanting to talk about sexism when I see it. I’m not angry–sometimes I’m frustrated, but I don’t want to highlight sexism, whether in movies or op-eds, in advertising or in my real life because I’m looking for something to be angry about, to complain about. As Ani DiFranco so sagely put it:

“I am not an angry girl, but it seems like I’ve got everyone fooled. Every time I say something they find hard to handle, they chalk it up to my anger and never to their own  fear.”

Instead, I bring it up because I think acknowledging the sexism and misogyny that still permeates our culture and discussing it is an important first step to rectifying these inequities and, ultimately, achieving a more equal and a more aware society, which benefits all of us, not just women.

A Thousand Points of Lite

Okay, this is amazing. Newsweek has released an inside the beltway spoof of the (scripted) reality shows “The Hills” and “The City” which takes us inside the world of Barack Obama, or as his screen caption identifies him, “Barack, President”. Entitled “The District,” this parody mimics the montage-heavy, sound-byte laden editing style of the shows after which it is modeled, and also features a similar soundtrack of clubby pop, interspersed with narration by an Obama impersonator (on a side note, who is that guy and why couldn’t SNL get someone that good to play Obama? Fred Armisen, take note) who sets the stage and introduces a cast of characters, including Obama’s BFFs, Joe and Hillary, who, we are told, used to be Obama’s “frenemies” until they joined his team. In one great part, footage of an Obama press conference is spliced together with footage of the Tim Geithner confirmation hearings to look like they’re having a really awkward conversation. Here’s a bit of the opening narration, spoken by pseudo-Barack over a pulsating electronic dance beat:

“Previously on The District: I’m Barack. I was a senator from Illinois, living the Chicago dream with my wife, Michelle and my girls, Sasha and Malia. Then I heard about the opportunity of a lifetime. So I decided to risk it all, give up everything I know, and run for President. And then…I actually won. I moved into this amazing house in the one city where you can make a difference. In this city, you have to learn pretty quickly where you fit in. There are the Democrats, like my best friends, Joe and Hillary…we used to be frenemies when we were all running for the Democratic nomination. Now, they’re totally on Team Barack. Then there’s the Republican crowd–we don’t really see eye to eye on most issues. I think they’re just nervous because their old friend in the White House just moved back to Texas. Now, I’m going to have to figure out what I can change and who I can trust. And it all begins here…in the District.

Not only is this clip extremely entertaining, but it’s a great lead-in to a lot of issues I’m starting to think about in relation to a class I’m taking this semester, entitled “Cultural Industries, Mass Media & Celebrity”. In the class, we’re going to look at a lot of aspects of the history and social construction of celebrity and fame, a topic I find incredibly fascinating, and one I think ties in nicely with the kind of work I am potentially interested in doing in the future, with media reform and/or media literacy and education. It also ties in nicely with my interest in issues of women in the media–sexism, negative body image, etc. Each person in the class is in charge of presenting one week’s material and leading the class discussion for that week, and my week will deal with celebrity and politics, and the interesting overlaps and intersections thereof. I’m really excited about this topic and I think it’s a very timely one–to take the most obvious example, there’s no doubt that President Obama (nope, still no less thrilling to type) has become a huge celebrity, a “rock star” of epic proportions, and I look forward to looking at the phenomenon of politicians-as-celebrities (not to mention celebrities-as-politicians like Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenneger, and, if Blagojovich had had his way, Oprah) as well as other related phenomena, such as the success of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Of course, at this point, my presentation is weeks away and we’re only a week or so into class so I haven’t delved much into the theoretical work, but even before the class, I’d been fascinated by the way that the modern media machine entertainment-izes everything, even, or perhaps especially, politics. Not that I think the politician-as-hero or politician-as-celebrity is by any means a new phenomenon. But with each election cycle, the level of media saturation and, thus, media consumption increases and media thus plays an ever greater role in guiding and dictating the discourse. Many even go so far as to argue that the media decides the race, and I’m not sure that is such a stretch. Indeed, as I touched on previously, I do believe that Obama’s understanding of the intersections between politics and media and, therefore, the importance of a multi-media platform and he and his campaign staff’s skillful use of a variety of forms of media, from web video to text message updates, to Facebook outreach to his prime-time TV special days before the election, was a huge contributing factor in his success. And he and his family truly have become celebrities, they have appeared on the cover of US Weekly, been interviewed by  Ellen Degeneres and the ladies of The View, and Beanie Baby recently released Sasha and Malia dolls, much to the consternation of Michelle Obama.

Being an avid reader and watcher of  both political coverage from a variety of sources, from MSNBC to Media Matters, Wonkette to the Washington Post and, I must admit, entertainment and celebrity coverage from a similarly wide range of  print publications, online sources and television, it’s extremely interesting how similar the conventions, stylistic choices, and even the content of the two kinds of coverage can sometimes be. The truth is,  it seems pretty clearly that it’s not just the media–politicians and their ties with the rich and famous make it all too easy to see them as celebrities of sorts, themselves. After all, part of the reason “The District” works so well as parody is that it hits just close enough to the truth that it is really funny. 

I’m sure I’ll have lots more to add as I get deeper into this class and start reading more things that relate directly to this topic, particularly as I prepare for my in-class presentation. Until then, watch “The District“. Will Barack’s stimulus package be his one-way ticket to Loserville? Will Joe’s big mouth cause tensions to run high? Who will Hillary catch Michelle with in the Lincoln bedroom? Tune in next Monday for an all new episode of “The District”!