"In this age, like all ages, when the problem of the perpetuation of a race or class and the destruction of its enemies, is that all-absorbing motive of civilized society, it seems irrelevant and wasteful still to create works whose only inspirations are individual human emotion and desire".

Man Ray The Age of Light

Lee Miller, a model for Man Ray and a photojournalist for Vogue during WWII, expresses this mantra with her photo taken in Hitler's bathtub.

     Now in the 21st century surrealism takes on a true surrealist quality with the photo project by Trevor Paglen:The Last Pictures" contains 100 images, chosen by him and a group of colleagues, to be etched on a silicon disc and put into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles above the equator, where it will join man-made satellites, both active and derelict, in an essentially friction-free state for, potentially, the next 4 1/2 billion years. The project, commissioned and presented by New York's Creative Time, Paglen writes, "was inspired by the idea that we should take communications satellites seriously as the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early twenty-first centuries."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/The-Last-Pictures-by-Trevor-Paglen-4009759.php#ixzz2BpqaUAUV

     Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, in their essay The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic explore the dangers involved at these intersections through the photography of National Geographic.  The gaze most relevant to this discussion is that of the "institutional, magazines gaze (evident in cropping, picture choice, captioning, etc)".  It is at this intersection where the magazine or scientific journal  presents evidence of the other in its portrait photographs that is statistically incorrect according to its own catalog.  Lutz and Collins reviewed 400 plus National Geographic  portrait photos of the" other "for their essay. They found that in 24% of these photos the subject of the gaze is smiling, yet during the course of its 100 year history, portrait cover photos of the" other" have presented the other as smiling in 38% of these photos.  This is an indication of fuzzy math but makes the" other" appealing to the editors gaze.

  The Kayapo of Brazil have taken a different  view of the western gaze and have used it to gain political and economic power within the Brazilan goverment.  Beth Conklin, in her research work: body paint, feather, and vcrs: aesthetics and authenticity in Amazonian activism observed how the Kayapo have utilized the western gaze to their advantage. The Kayapo after numerous encounters with westerns saw the discomforting gaze placed upon them because of their native dress and body paint.  In order to deflect this gaze they adopted western styles of dress for public consumption. When the government engaged in efforts to take native lands, the Kayapo began protesting in their native dress. This became the tool the Kayapo used to gain political and economic power, it also gave them control of the gaze.

  

    Today, following the storm of the century a number of images have been posted to social networking sites to convey the destruction and devastating effects of this storm. The evolution of the camera has allowed a greater diffusion of images in real time connecting a cross cultural sharing of events.  Franz Roh, in Mechanism and Expression views the instrument as a form of literacy; …”not to be able to handle a camera will soon be looked upon as equal to illiteracy”.  How can this form of literacy be interpreted in relationship to two historical events, Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012?     

 Instagram Gets 10 #Sandy Photos Per Second During Height Of Storm

by Editor, Posted Oct 30th 2012 10:05AM

512029

The story of Hurricane Sandy is largely being told through photos, in part thanks to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app bought by Facebook this year.

More than 244,000 photos have been posted to Instagram with the hashtag #sandy, according to app founder Kevin Systrom. More than 144,000 more have been posted under #hurricanesandy and another 23,000 photos under #frankenstorm.

"There are now 10 pictures per second being posted with the hashtag #sandy - most are images of people prepping for the storm and images of scenes outdoors," Systrom said in a statement that was posted to Poynter 

.

     During Hurricane Katrina, a category three hurricane compared to Sandy a category one the images transmitted through the airwaves consisted of those presented by photojournalist yet the message seems quite different.

 

     Nicolas Peterson, in his essay; Early 20th Century Photography of Australian Aboriginal Families Illustration or Evidence? Informs us that in the late 19th century the ability to reproduce photographic images on a large scale, reduced the cost of these images making them economically affordable and accessible to a larger audience. This lead to a boom in pictorial postcards depicting native cultures.  Peterson argues that this anthropology photography held a dual purpose, one as evidence of culture the other as mere illustration. In order for the Victorian public to place these photographs within a context of their cultural understanding, most photographs were reconstructed to convey Victorian ideas of sex, gender, family and race.  The Aboriginal concept of family differed from those of European cultures, which gives weight to Peterson argument of photography as illustration.   The subjects have been taken out of their cultural context to fit a Victorian idea of family.  The family portrait.

     These last two portraits in my view can be looked upon as both illustration and evidence because they convey what Elizabeth Edwards believed to be the power of ethnographic photography; "Photography can communicate about culture, people's lives, experiences and beliefs, not at the level of surface description but as a visual metaphor which bridges that space between the visible and invisible, which communicates not through the realist paradigm but through a lyrical expressiveness".

     This photograph was so popular, that it was copyrighted.  Could its popularity be based on the Victorian male gaze?

     Daniel Chandler's" Notes on the Gaze'', offers us several viewpoints or gazes in which to examine the object or subject of the Gaze.  Dennis O'Rourke in a scene from his documentary Cannibal Tours subjects us to a number of gazes within one frame, through this presentation O'Rourke is asking several question using an anthropology frame work. Who is the cannibal here, the native, the tourist or the filmmaker?  Using Chandler's guidelines on the gaze, I believe that of the three gazes offered the intra-diegetic has the most impact.  Can you tell how this gaze is represented in this scene?

     Margaret Mead was one of the first Anthropologist to utilize photography in her ethnography of the Bali culture.  Although this photograph does not appear to work in an ethnographic sense of  anthropology, it does offer an idea of photography and its usefulness in ethnography that Elizabeth Edwards presented in her essay, Beyond the Boundary: a consideration of the expressive in photography and anthropology; "Photography can communicate about culture, people's lives, experiences and beliefs, not at the level of surface description but as a visual metaphor which bridges that space between the visible and invisible, which communicates not through the realist paradigm but through a lyrical expressiveness".

Using semiological analysis, the meaning of this advertisement is made quite clear for members of the Third World Community. Nike gives your permission to just do it!!

     Today I would like to introduce for photographic analysis Post-Modernist photographer Renee Cox, who like Walter Evans engaged an audience that had been denied inclusion in the cannons of photographic art, Afro-Americans.

    Today I would like to take liberty with an essay by John Berger, Ways of Seeing by re-appropriating his idea of vanity as expressed in painting and transfer it to photography;" You have photographed a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you published her photograph and entitled it Kate Middleton, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure".

     The question is for who's pleasure was this photograph taken, given the slumping European economy does the consumer have a desire for this form of consumption or is it driven by another element? The answer to this question might be found in the accompanying video.

    Photographer Renee Cox, offers not only a re-appropriation of a classic nude but is both author and subject of the "gaze".

                 

End of Innocence: Questioning Photography

     Susan Sontag, in her essay America Seen through Photographs, Darkly explores the evolution of photography in the twentieth century through Walt Whitman's vision of America as expressed in the publication Leaves of Grass; "If each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a  beauty, it becomes superficial to single out some things as beautiful and others as not".

     Sontag's argument, "To photograph is to confer importance.  There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects".

     A photograph from Edward Steichen's Family of Man.  Steichen is credited with being the first fashion photographer of the twentieth century as well as one of the highest paid. Later he become the Director of Photography for MoMa.  Sontag's criticism;"Steichen set up the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a great many of the people depicted and, potentially , with the subject of every photograph: citizens of World Photography all".

     Fashion photographer Diane Arbus took a different approach.

 

     Sontag's argument, "The Arbus photographs convey the anti-humanist message which people of good will in the 1970's are eager to be troubled by just as they wished, in the 1950's to be consoled and distracted by a sentimental humanism".

     "American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to finally, a parody of Whitman's program".

Photography as Business

      Photojournalism has evolved to a business and as a point of social awareness and often leading to the path of Paparazzi.  The public's consumption of these images has drawn a fine line between Photojournalism and Paparazzi.  Photojournalist Weegee aka Arthur Fellig gained a reputation for arriving at the scene of a crime even before the police enabling him to sustain a career from the 1940's until his death in 1968

   Pulitzer Prize winning Photojournalist Kevin Carter had a much shorter career

Photography as Art

     Critic Solomon-Godeau states in her article, Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the

Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics; "the institutions and discourses that collectively function to construct the object "art" are allied to the material determinations of the  market place, which themselves establish and conform the commodity status of the work of art".

     Today the work of artist will be given to explore this contradiction in the evolution of photography, Walter Evans and Damon Lewis.

Walter Evans took a series of candid photos on the New York City Subway using the technology available to him which enabled him to conceal the camera in his coat.

     New York Times Photojournalist Damon Lewis won third prize for Picture of the Year International, unknown to the judges at the time was that the photos were taken on an iPhone with a Hipstamtic app.:

   Each photographer used the technology available to him yet one is Art and one is not, can you guess which one?