Aric Mayer Studios

The Feral Exoticism of Photojournalism

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:12:00 +0000

Is it unreasonable to conceive of an image-consuming public responding with similar detached aesthetic appreciation to a photo-journalistic style deriving not only from the "anomic" street-photo tradition but also from the feral exoticism of fashion photography? Even the most committed photographer, such as Meiselas, is so far hostage to the interests of editors and publishers and their products, which in the main have little to do with "truth" but which willingly merchandise a nihilistic fascination with death, death, and more death, to help us steer a course between intolerable personal anxiety and its alternative numbness.

Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions, p. 258.

The Self and the Other

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:55:00 +0000

At the start of awareness of the self lies the presence of you, and perhaps even the presence of a more general we. Only in dialogue, in argument, in opposition, and also in aspiring towards a new community is awareness of my self created, as a self-contained being, separate from another. I know that I am, because I know that another is.

Father Jozef Tischner, The Philosophy of Drama

[...]The world has always been a great Tower of Babel. However, it is a tower in which God has mixed not just the languages but also the cultures and customs, passions and interests, and whose inhabitant He has made into an ambivalent creature combining the Self and non-Self, himself and the Other, his own and the alien.

[...]The dialogue with Others has never been and will never be easy, especially today, when everything is on such an enormous scale and is so complicated that it is hard to take in and control, and when many forces are working to obstruct this dialogue, or even to make it impossible. But even without these short-term political, ideological or economically motivate interests and aims there are other, substantial, fundamental problems.

One of them is the focus of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of so-called linguistic relativity. In the simplest terms, it says that thinking is formed on the basis of language, and as we speak in different languages, each of us creates his own image of the world, unlike any other. These images are not compatible and are not replaceable. For this reason dialogue, though not impossible, demands a serious effort, patience, and the will of its participants to understand and communicate. Being aware of the fact that in conversing with the Other I am communing with someone who at the same time sees the world differently from me and understands it in another way is important in creating a positive atmosphere for dialogue.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Other

The Hole in the New Journalism Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:48:00 +0000

For those of us who are interested in the future and potential futures of humanitarian and accountability journalism, there are three current must-read pieces online by Clay Shirky, Brent Cunningham and David Campbell. Each piece gives a different perspective on a shared and painful truth that faces journalism in the near and medium range future--the lack of a sustainable economic model for professional reporting.

Clay Shirky gives an excellent talk over at the Nieman Journalism Lab where he lays out how monolithic organizations like the New York Times were able to fund accountability journalism through advertisers. The nut of it is this: advertisers don't really want to be a part of accountability journalism but there simply weren't enough outlets for them to reach the audience and so they had to buy into newspapers. By buying ads in one section they supported the whole organization. The same was true for readers. One might want the sports section, the other the crossword puzzle, another the arts section and so on, but each had to pay for the whole thing.

That monolithic package kept the newsroom open. Now with newer efficiencies and many more options, the erosion of the monolithic news organization is leaving the newsroom with fewer and fewer options for income. The result? The demise of accountability journalism on a medium scale, ie state and federal reporting. Crowd sourcing can handle the hyper-local and the few remaining news organizations can handle the global, but state and federal reporting is severely diminished. Corruption goes up and accountability drops.

In the second piece, Brent Cunningham in the Columbia Journalism Review calls for journalism to step up to its role as citizen advocate and to renounce its recent functions as a mouthpiece for those with power and influence. This is an excellent and lengthy read on what hasn't been done well and what journalism could offer as a fourth estate that monitors and challenges public discourse to keep it honest and fair.

And finally, David Campbell has a thorough and thought provoking series on his blog that examines the new media strategies that are available or are being considered for journalism as it transitions into the internet. There are many new options for multimedia storytelling and rethinking the arrangement of information away from linear to nodal and matrixed forms.

To oversimplify things a bit, Shirky demonstrates why there is no current sustainable economic model for accountability journalism, Cunningham lays out in detail what journalism could offer that is of direct value to citizen consumers, and Campbell gives a look at the tools and strategies that will be employed in the new journalism of tomorrow.

If Shirky is right and the last century of accountability journalism was coincidentally funded by advertising, then the increasing and more targeted options available to advertisers are only going to continue to move them away from it. Without advertising, the current economic options for reporting dwindle. Since the only revenue sources available online are advertising related, there is no sustainable economic model going forward. And that is the hole at the center of all three of these discussions.

Cunningham's piece in CJR offers a good picture of the kind of journalism that would provide real value to consumers in our democracy, value that is worth supporting financially in some way. That is something to aim for.

In the meantime, the market has gotten so used to the idea of accountability journalism being invisibly bundled with other ad funded media that it has little or no market presence. That has to change. For the market to recognize the value of a fourth estate, even as flawed as it has been, it may have to experience its absence.

What will emerge will likely be a new economy of some kind. To put it in venture capital parlance, the pain of the market will make a new solution somewhere down the road. But there is a significant gap between where we are today and the time in the future when consumers are brought to a position where the pain is tangibly real and paying money for accountability journalism in some fashion is better than enduring a world without it.

Addendum: It's worth noting that this is primarily an American narrative. Other countries such as the UK have decided that journalism is a public good that is worth state funding. In my market in the US, local budget cuts at NPR have led to significant cuts in programming which have been replaced by the BBC World News. So, a big thank you goes out to the citizens of the UK who pay through their taxes to keep the BBC functioning. And you can already see how the shift is taking place toward the split between the global and the hyper-local.

Clay Shirky and CJR

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:22:00 +0000

The rhetoric of American journalism describes an adversarial fourth estate, a redoubt for professional skeptics who scrutinize authority in the name of the public and help keep the public discourse honest. As long as our newspapers enjoyed quasi-monopolies and the evening newscasts were a national touchstone, the moth-eaten reality of this self-image was easily ignored. But the hard truth is that the press mostly amplifies the agendas of others—the prominent and the powerful—and tends to aggressively assume its adversarial role only when someone or something—a president, a CEO, an institution—is wounded and vulnerable. (Even some of the most important journalistic work of recent years—the exposures of warrant-less wiretaps and CIA ghost prisons—came after the Bush White House had begun its precipitous slide in the polls.)

[...] If ever there were a moment for our press to begin to change this dynamic, to embrace a mission more in keeping with the ideals of public service and an adversarial fourth estate, it is now. America is at a perilous juncture in its history, but one that is ripe with opportunity, too. The mythology of the nation—exceptional, above the taint of history—has been undercut by a terror attack, two botched wars, the reality of torture, a flooded city, a wounded economy, staggering inequality, a shameful health-care system . . . the list is long. It has been undercut, too, by the emerging realities of the twenty-first century: a multipolar world, transglobal problems that no amount of debt-funded escapism can keep at bay, a realization that America must lead, but cannot dictate. America has created systems—legal, political, educational—that have much to admire, but they are not sacrosanct. In short, many of the ideas that we take for granted are not the only good ideas, or necessarily the ones best suited for every set of circumstances. On many fronts, the circumstances are decidedly different from those that allowed this notion of American exceptionalism to persist, fundamentally unchallenged, for so long.
Take a Stand: CJR

[...]dated from some time between the rise of the penny press and the end of the Second World War, we had a very unusual circumstance — and I think especially in the United States — where we had commercial entities producing critical public goods. We had ad-supported newspapers producing accountability journalism.
Now, it’s unusual to have that degree of focus on essentially both missions — both making a profit and producing this kind of public value. But that was the historic circumstance, and it lasted for decades. But it was an accident. There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.
Clay Shirky: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

Confessions of a Bone Saw Artist

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:22:00 +0000

For the better part of a decade I made the bulk of my living from photo retouching. I worked on tens of thousands of images that, with a conservative estimate, were printed on over 30 billion individual magazine pages. If those pages were laid out flat from top to bottom, they would create a line over 2.7 million miles long, enough paper to stretch to the moon and back 5.5 times, or to circle the entire earth in a double sided 80-foot-wide superhighway of completely disposable full color culture.

In that time I retouched across the spectrum of the magazine industry, from documentary/photojournalism and fine art all the way to fashion and beauty. On the one end working on "straight" photographs with tight restrictions on the retouching, and far on the other end of the spectrum doing major alterations of the female figure, the kind that in real life could only be achieved in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory.

This latter kind of retouching I grew to call "bone saw work" for it required reshaping the models in ways that could only be achieved by reforming their skeletons. This included moving eye sockets, raising cheek bones, stretching limbs, lowering foreheads, raising foreheads, narrowing shoulders, shrinking ears, lengthening necks, straightening fingers and toes, reshaping shins and calves, narrowing pelvises and waistlines, shrinking and straightening noses, re-contouring brows and chins, squeezing ribcages, reducing knee caps, and straightening teeth. After that came the retouching to flesh and skin.

For a major project on that end of the retouching spectrum, I might receive an image of a gorgeous young woman that at first glance appeared near perfect. Then, with scrutiny, the flaws begin to emerge. These are not really flaws at all, but are the things that make her an actual living person like the rest of us; nostril hair, a dangling eyelash, a thin spot in her eyebrows, a slight asymetry in the arrangement of her eye sockets, a cleft in her chin, veins in her eyeballs, pores, chin hair, ear lobes, a slight shine from natural oils on her skin, deep clavical indentations, boney shoulders, ligaments in her neck, wrinkled knuckles, chapped lips, chewed fingernails, and so on. In the course of the retouching process the image is slowly, carefully, reshaped into something else entirely.

That original image of a remarkably beautiful young woman will look like a mangled mess once it is compared to the final retouched version. Through the process the image is transformed from a photograph of an actual person with a human body, a name, and a history, into an idealized picture of her that speaks to an unachievable perfection, out of the reach of any but the rarest of individuals.

Bone saw work became possible only in the past decade and is becoming more and more prolific throughout the industry. When I started working with Photoshop in 1992, much of the retouching was very surface level and happened pixel by pixel. With each iteration of the program since, powerful new tools have been introduced into the profession and the speed of their introduction has outstripped the industry's ability to stay in control. Reshaping a nose in 1992 was painstaking work that could take hours or even days. Now with liquification tools, if you don't like the shape of a nose, you can pick a brush and push it around. In a few seconds the whole character of a face can be altered. The implications of this are profound.

Any serious artist studying the human form must be keenly aware of how the internal structures of the body fill out and influence the figure. A simple and accurate drawing by Rembrandt, for example, depicts the surface features of the body--its skin, hair and so on--but the line accounts also for the location and accuracy of the internal structures as well. Bones, organs, muscle, and fat all combine, each performing their own function, to create the volume of the overall person. Part of what makes the work of the masters so incredible is that we recognize the authenticity of the overall volume of the figures they draw and paint.

Photography quickly allows us to skip this entire body of anatomical knowledge and go straight to mechanized accurate depictions of the body which can be captured in any state of rest or motion, dress or undress, exactly as it appears. No understanding of the body as a whole is required to adequately represent the human body. And generally speaking, the raw photographs start with anatomically accurate information, even if the models being photographed represent a tiny fraction of the body types that make up the human race.

In the retouching though, complete alterations of the figure are routinely practiced, creating an evolving abnormal vision of the body. This results in the ongoing erosion of our visual sense of what is natural. We understand photographs to be depictions of the real, and they are dependent on the real for their source, and yet we are bombarded with images that are retouched in ways that defy nature and establish unachievable visual norms for the human figure.

Much has been written about the negative effects of such retouching. It normalizes perfection and sets standards of comparison that no individual viewer can achieve. Only a tiny fraction of women wear a size two or zero, but by looking at the pages of some magazines, you'd think that was the norm. Presenting the exceptional as the norm puts the average viewer in a position of constant failure to compare to this artificial and synthetic vision of a person floating in front of us. a ghost of what might be possible if only we could find the formula for breaking our own bodies down or apart and reassembling them in this other vision of self. This plays perfectly into the overall business strategies at work in the fashion and beauty industries.

Professor Jeremy Kees at the Villanova School of Business ran a study demonstrating how the skewing of body norms increases the effectiveness of advertising. In his study women were presented with images of skinny models in a commercial setting and were then tested as to how they would respond. The women exposed to the images of overly thin models tested as feeling worse about themselves, but tested with more positive attitudes about the products being sold. Women exposed to normal sized models had no diminished sense of self, but tested with less favorable attitudes to the products being sold. See the logic at work here?

This constant beating down has real consequences for many viewers. One of the most remarkable examples of this can be seen in an image from a recent issue of Glamour Magazine that defeats this process. Many of you will have already seen this image, photographed by Walter Chin. On page 194 of the September issue, in a three inch by three inch photograph, 20 year-old model Lizzi Miller sits on an apple crate in a thong. She leans forward slightly, her arm covering her breasts, a confident and radiant smile on her face. There is a small roll on her belly and actual curves on her legs and arms. At size 12, Lizzi is the size of the average American woman.

That little belly roll is pure rebellion in the fashion and beauty industry, and it's everything as to why this image has had such an incredible effect. Images of Lizzi have been published before, and in each (that I have seen) she is doing what models do, tucking in, tightening, lifting up. Here she appears relaxed and unguarded, and is all the more beautiful for it. Relief and appreciation poured out from readers and can be read in the 1000+ responses posted on Glamour's website.

Equally significant to the reader response is the extreme rarity of a photograph like this in the context of a fashion magazine. To be clear, this image was intentionally created to have this impact on its viewers. As Glamour Editor in Chief Cindi Leiv says, "We'd commissioned it for a story on feeling comfortable in your skin, and wanted a model who looked like she was." The image isn't rare because it can't be done. It is rare because it is selling something outside of the consumer logic of the fashion and beauty industry.

The stereotypically thin model image serves a very pragmatic purpose in generating an overall climate of desire and consumption that serves the fashion industry at the personal expense of the audience. Lizzi Miller, as she appears on p. 194, defeats this basic exchange between the readers and the advertisers, and the reader responses are permeated with an atmosphere of relief from the pressures to conform and consume. It is also significant to note how far the difference is between talking about body norms and actually showing them.

Here is where it gets really interesting and exciting if you would like to see more of this kind of work. Judging from the comments on the Glamour site, thousands upon thousands of you do.

The magazine publishing industry is in a state of suspension. Trapped between increasing online competition and falling ad dollars due to the recession, many publications are scrambling to figure out what the future holds. If you like, you can read here how a lot of the industry has gotten itself into a serious financial pickle catering to advertisers at your expense. The short of it is this--more than ever, you, the reader, have the power.

You have the power to talk back to the magazines through social media. And you have the one thing that they absolutely must have to survive--your attention. That attention is a commodity that is traded by magazines with advertisers and converted into real dollars. If you withhold your attention, magazines fail. If you lavish it, they thrive.

Two things need to happen soon, and they need to be reader generated.

First, there needs to be a reader generated movement to request magazines to give an honest and full disclosure of their internal retouching policies. The audience has a right to know how the images are being manipulated. Every image receives some form of digital manipulation. Retouching disclosure statements would simply explain in broad terms what a magazine allows and doesn't allow in their image processing.

A reader would be able then to appreciate a magazine with a more clear understanding of what they are looking at. It would also be a commitment from the magazine to its readers to work within a set of self described limits. If even just a few major magazines made a point of communicating their limits to their readers, it would set a precedent in the industry with far reaching implications.

The second thing that needs to happen is going to sound crazy. There needs to be a reader generated campaign to raise subscription rates. Imagine what would happen if the subscribers of a magazine said that they would voluntarily pay more for the magazine if it would give them more quality content of the kind that they want. The publishers would fall off their chairs.

I realize that this seems counter-intuitive, but here is how it works. If you are buying subscriptions on the cheap, the only hope magazines have to make money is from advertisers by selling your attention as a commodity. After all, you aren't really paying for the magazine. But if you are willing to pay more, suddenly you, the reader are starting to pay for the content and the magazine has to work for you, not the advertisers. Remember Kees' study? If you aren't going to pay for those pages, advertisers will, and it will serve their purposes, not yours.

Disclosure: I have never worked for Glamour Magazine. I only identify them by name because they published such an exemplary photograph.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Systems of Making and Distribution

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:08:00 +0000

This is part nine in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Up to this point, I have argued and demonstrated that the way images are created and distributed involves a series of pressures, mostly economic and ideological, that are exerted upon the process to influence the images' performance before and the pressure exerted upon audiences. If we are to conceive of new means of exerting political impact through images, we must get beyond the critique and potential of the images themselves and look into the logics and purposes of their creation and distribution systems. In almost every case, a decisive variable in the ultimate political outcome will be the economic platform upon which image distribution systems are built.

This holds to be true from the most tawdry forms of tabloid photojournalism through the most well regarded documentary work and into book publishing and gallery and museum exhibitions. Nothing achieves distribution without performing within or establishing itself in opposition to an economy or economies. Work that does not perform well within an economy will either have to wait until the cultural and economic models are ready to receive it, or will have to create its own distribution systems with the full knowledge that these sytems are as much a part of the work as the images themselves.

To these ends I propose a basic outline that demonstrates how images are made and identifies the key variables in assessing the pressures exerted on those images from their conception to their final format and presentation in front of an audience. Projects whose goal it is to create realized political effect will have to address each of the variables in the process and identify the economic and political goals at each stage of the way in order to maximize their overall influence over the final outcome.

At the beginning is the identification of a subject and the decision that it is worthwhile depicting that subject photographically in some fashion for an audience.

The goal is create a body of images…

…that will then perform in front of and exert a kind of political pressure upon an audience or audiences.

In investigating the subject, an interrogating agency is employed whose purpose is to interrogate the subject and to translate it in a meaningful and accessible fashion. This is an organization(s) or individuals who are seeking to understand and interpret the subject. The interaction between this interrogating agency and the subject will shape the entire potential of any media outcome. This is the most important interaction because without it little understanding or access is possible.

Within the subject, targeted points of entry, depiction and potential political pressure are identified. These are points that have the potential to be both meaningful in communicating the subject to an audience and useful in achieving political effect if pressure is exerted upon them from the audience in response.

A photographer, photographers or some other form of media agency identifies the subject and begins the process of depiction. This agency frequently differs from the interrogating agency and often relies on information acquired from this authoritative body.

Once created by the photographer or media agency, the images must pass through a distribution channel, which will select and distribute images that are specifically in support of its own political and economic goals. This involves editing and sequencing in ways that follow the logic and ideologies of the distribution mechanism itself, with the goal of creating an effect on the audience that is at once desired and in keeping with the political and economic goals of the corporate entities handling the distribution. This is equally true of new media distribution systems as well as old. Nothing enters into distribution that is not in keeping with the economies and fundamental missions of the distribution channels themselves. The difficulty with this is that the channels tend to shape the viewer experience in ways that are self-serving and limiting.

At this point a viewing experience has been constructed and arrives at the audience, having passed through all of the shaping pressures in each part of the process. From interrogating agency to distribution channel, each will have exerted political pressure on the final media experience in service to the aims of each contributing organization.

A remote audience far removed from the subject will receive the media experience as it’s primary means of picturing the subject. Audience members will also have other media experiences with which to compare and the images will create shared or competing experiences that either reinforce and repeat, or challenge and defeat audience expectations of the media experience as a whole.

The ongoing success of periodical publications, whether they are newspaper, magazines, or internet-based media, depends on fulfilling audience expectations from that distribution channel. The tolerance for challenging and defeating audience expectations is severely limited by the economic goals of the channel, and those challenging and defeating effects on the audience will be regulated carefully by the distribution channels themselves.

Political change often involves a restructuring of information and the architecture and forms that information takes as it achieves an impact on the audience. Change must achieve some sort of disharmony from the other media with which it is competing if new action is to be achieved. Since this is frequently an undesirable outcome for existing distribution channels disharmony is resisted.

Ultimately the audience then has a response to the media experience that directs a kind of political action back towards the targeted points within the subject at which they have been pointed. The project is successful in so far as it drives realized political pressure from the audience back towards the targeted fulcrums within the subject where political pressure will hopefully achieve the maximum realized effect.

To achieve this we need to recognize that the medium of photography itself is political in that pictures are assigned, created, edited, distributed and received by and within corporate bodies that have specific political aims that shape the end experience. Where they direct the viewer ultimately determines a net political effect. This can be in a wide variety of directions, from a general emotional experience to targeted political action.

Work that disrupts or makes more apparent these political exchanges leads us away from the general and back into the specific, where political solutions can be created. Images that defeat viewer expectations make the latent expectations more apparent and by doing so make their political implications more consciously apparent. For the broader audience there must be a recognition that the very act of making and viewing a photograph has political implications, and that the viewer is not a passive recipient of the image but in fact participates in a broad exchange of affect and information that has real political impact, both for themselves and for specific political realities throughout the world. Targeting and locating where the viewer is placed in a relationship to the subject has everything to do with understand or identifying how the images exert actual political pressure.

Misinformation and Outright Lies

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:40:00 +0000

If you spend any time reading here, you already know that I am quite invested in the exploration of how popular media align themselves with the viewers' preconceptions to create predictable and ideologically desirable experiences that are marketable.

This morning CJR has an excellent post reviewing research on countering misinformation and outright lying in the media. The short version is that, one, it is very hard to do, and two, when you do counter, people are just as likely to believe what they prefer to from the two now competing pieces of information before them then they are to believe your counter argument.

In other words, if you want to believe that Obama is setting up death panels, then you probably are going to continue in your belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Here are a few quotes that get right to the point.

Once factually inaccurate ideas take hold in people’s minds, there are no reliable strategies to dislodge them—especially from the minds of those for whom the misinformation is most ideologically convenient...

Efforts to refute misinformation are most effective when a false claim can be countered (sic) a clear-cut alternative narrative—something that creates a mental image “as vivid, as strong” as what you’re trying to negate...

An even better press strategy, he believes, is “naming and shaming”—calling out the people who help falsehoods advance, and cutting them off from media access. Such an approach might not change minds on a particular issue, Nyhan said, but it would “increas[e] the reputational costs” of spreading lies, and thus create a climate in which truthfulness and accuracy were more prized.

And finally:

So where does all this leave the individual reporter, working on a specific story for a general audience, who wants to debunk a false statement made by a subject? “The best chance,” Schul said, “is to tell a good story—you want to create a causal chain that links the new information to evidence the perceiver already knows so that it can modify the old interpretation [with] the one you wish to implant.”

You can read the full post here. The chief problem with this entire conversation lies in the fact that it still fails to completely deal with the economies within which journalists do their work. There are clear systems of financial rewards and penalties within the industry. The kinds of watchdog journalism that are advocated on CJR, and these are generally ones that I agree with, are not necessarily financially supported by the audience.

It seems likely to me that there are simply more people who want to consume media that reinforces their preconceptions than there are people who want to support a journalism industry that would be more neutral and therefore more confusing and less reassuring in its political orientation. But still, this is the work that has to be done. At least for a long enough time that a new market emerges as an alternative to the MSNBC vs Fox News climate that we consume today.

Not coincidentally, CJR is a not-for-profit publication attached to a major university. Do we need to expand private and public funding for more similar ventures? Probably. But how do we regulate such an industry? CJR is in a sense for-profit as well since it is a part of a very expensive university that promises a certain kind of education and thought, and is beholden to the market to provide that.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Viewer in a Position of Power

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:30:00 +0000

This is part eight in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

In an interview with World Press Photo Evelien Shotsman, the picture editor of Oxfam Novib, lays out her basic strategy in establishing a means of framing her subject, the world’s poor.

For a photojournalist it is not effective anymore just to try and capture the facts of life or tell an untold story. The media won't pay, the people won't buy.

We are spoilt: seen it, been there, done it.

It is getting more difficult for NGO's to convince the general public of the moral obligation people have in the rich parts of the world to support the less fortunate living in the poor parts.

But I still think photography is a strong tool in advocating a world without poverty.

Not by trying to capture the big contemporary issues, like climate change and food crises in a general way. But by telling small stories of people trying to live a small but happy life. Not by trying to show "the truth" but by showing that the truth has many faces.

For people to become interested, they need to be moved in an emotional and esthetical way.

So all techniques, manipulations and enhancements are allowed to highlight the emotional quality of the photo. In this sense I see a need for the photojournalist to become a photo artist of reality.

The photojournalist has always been a photo artist of reality. There never was any other alternative. What Shotsman is recognizing is that direct political visual interactions with world poverty are not welcome either by the broad viewing public or the media. What she is calling for are new forms of depicting world poverty that are marketable within media business models that are increasingly dependent on advertising for their viability.

The interaction between the “people in the rich parts of the world” and the images she describes is a profoundly political exchange in itself, for it directs the affluent viewer away from the systemic roots of poverty towards an emotional experience that subtly reinforces his or her affluence and privilege. In our neighborhoods and jobs we may be of somewhat unremarkable status, but when faced with someone whose entire annual income measures around $100.00, suddenly we become immensely powerful. The $28,000.00 price tag on the average American car becomes a symbol of 280 years of labor by another. In these terms the cost of the average American house represents 2,000 years of labor. If that person is living a small but happy life, then we must be near gods in our own economic might.

Continue reading with Part Nine.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Rupturing the Viewer's Sense of Self

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:27:00 +0000

This is part seven in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Photographs of suffering can be consumed latently as a reinforcement of status and power in the viewer, effectively achieving two internal goals. First, the viewer is reminded of his or her general compassion and good nature by feeling the associated affect that goes along with caring or pity, and second the viewer, who is located by the photograph in a nonspecific relationship with the subject is generally absolved of personal responsibility and therefore can simultaneously experience an affirmation of power and privilege. The sale of luxury items is then entirely compatible with this exchange.

However, this audience exchange is severely disrupted when the suffering points directly back to the audience members themselves. On September 11, 2001, following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, People Magazine did what seemed impossible by creating in 18 hours 87 pages of edit focusing on the attacks. Prominently featured were images taken throughout that day. By Wednesday morning, the 12th, the magazine was on press and was entering distribution by Thursday night. There had been no time to contact advertisers and give them the opportunity to pull their ads, and they were run alongside the emerging news pictures of the attacks. Immediately there was a backlash from both the readers and the advertisers. Readers complained that juxtaposing the typical consumer advertising with the September 11 images and stories was disrespectful and distasteful. In the next issue then People President Nora McAniff was compelled to write a letter explaining the presence of advertising.

What is so significant here are not the specific images of the attacks of September 11. They were no more graphic or inherently troubling than other war and disaster images that are in circulation. The chief difference is that these are images that the readers identify with directly. This was an attack aimed directly at the readership and at their symbols and not on some remote constituency.

The effects this had on advertising were significant. Advertisers across the industry and in many publications quickly responded with complex instructions on how their ads should be placed. Many demonstrated a clear aversion to association with coverage of the attacks and their related issues and requested that their ads be run at a minimum distance away from any stories and subject that they wished to avoid.

In the case of the September 11 coverage, the images ruptured the expectations of the readers’ senses of self by showing them their vulnerability and thereby created a commodity that was incompatible with advertising. There is no greater consumer buzzkill than to remind the viewer that they too are mortal and subject to the same entropic laws as everyone else, and that world events, time and decay will eventually lead to their own physical deaths and to the end of their symbols and culture.

Further evidence of this rupture in the audience’s expectations from the publication can be seen in the basic way an audience is created. Publications are cyclical and predictable. Any publication’s audience loyalty is created and sustained through a subtle reinforcement of the audience’s own perceptions and beliefs over time. While the events depicted may be new, the attitudes, beliefs and conceptions that the audience has towards them are not. These are reinforced repeatedly over time, giving the viewer an inner sense that the publication is in sync with their own ways of organizing experience and belief. The rule is to show the reader what they already know to be true. The facts can be new, but the experience of them is not.

Continue reading with Part Eight.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Suffering and Viewer Status

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This is part six in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

When a photograph of human suffering speaks to the mythic, to the general and to the poetic it activates affect within the viewer that has no obvious connection to any effective action or remedy. This can work to insulate the viewer from the trauma. It is entirely possible to simultaneously feel compassion for the subjects of rendered accounts of humanitarian suffering while behaving politically in opposition to them.

There is a kind of political equivalent of Newton’s Law of Motion at work. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When viewing images of death, suffering and deprivation from places, cultures, and classes that are removed or remote from the audience, we are looking into the lives of the ‘other.’ By seeing them as poor, deprived and/or suffering, we, the viewers, are placed in a position of privilege and power. The work reciprocally points back to our own relative affluence, health and security.

For the western audience, exposure to these images creates two effects simultaneously. While they potentially evoke compassion, they also reciprocally reaffirm our relative economic and physical security in relationship to the subjects. The logic of this exchange is written right into their distribution strategy. The images are not made for the edification of the subjects themselves, or for the makers of the photographs, as would be the case in tourist photography, but are made specifically to be sent to an audience that has a significant advantage over the subjects in terms of wealth, power and security.

The net political impact of these images on that audience is determined by a complex interaction between how much empathy or compassion is evoked in the viewer and where the viewer is located by the photograph in a political relationship with the subject. Images that emphasize the mythic over the political, while they may evoke compassion, tend to avoid the specific viewer/subject relationship and, by emphasizing the general and poetic, steer the audience away from the real world political realities and towards an inner unspecific experience of trauma or suffering, one that has the potential to dislocate the images from their sources/subjects and use them as a kind of entertainment. The mythic serves to steer the audience away from the systemic roots of these problems towards a general aesthetic experience that, while moving, has no obligation to generate any political pressure that drives realized political change on a level that has a hope of impacting and improving the conditions of the subjects in a specific way.

Continue reading with Part Seven.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Viewer Experience as Commodity

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

This is part five in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

At the base of all magazine and newspaper templates exists a relationship that the publication has with its demographic. Each publication has a foundational formula that seeks to target their demographic and increase readership by speaking in their voice and reinforcing their worldview. Generally the publication seeks to generate an experience of self in the reader that is affirming and consistent with the reader’s perception of themselves as they are or as they would like to be. This is a consistent but subtle exchange. “When I read ‘X’ publication I feel empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate, generous, successful, actualized, rugged, self reliant, beautiful, popular, esteemed etc. The degree to which this exchange with the reader is a commodity worth paying for determines the likely success of the publication.

The generation of this basic reader experience is what determines the boundaries of the field within which the publication will operate. There is also a formal predictability involved in the exchange. The reader not only has a desirable experience of self but also encounters a familiar form in the publication. This will almost always be in accordance with the advertising that is targeted to the publications demographic. The inner and formal expectations in the readership must be maintained and updated to maximize the desirability of the publication both to readers and advertisers. The edit can only operate within the boundaries established by the advertisers’ need to achieve their goals.

Within the genres of lifestyle, pop culture, fashion and beauty, this would seem obvious. Content and advertising nearly are the same. But when the subject of the edit turns to humanitarian issues, images that convey war, disaster, famine, poverty, crisis, disease and so on have evolved a visual language that is compatible with advertising on a more subtle level. This relationship needs to be more fully understood in an examination of the effect the images have on the audience. To be effective, advertising must maintain its internal logic that consumption of a specific product is the answer to an implied problem, with the desired political outcome being increasing consumer demand.

Continue reading with Part Six.

Magazine Death Spiral

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:06:00 +0000

Yesterday a door to door salesman came to my house to try and get me to 'sponsor' him in a magazine selling contest. Should he be able to accrue 5,000 points by selling magazine subscriptions, he will receive a trip to Europe. Had I been to Europe? How was it? It sure must be nice.

The pitch had nothing to do with the magazines and everything to do with helping this young gentleman achieve his dream of wooing the continental ladies (I'm paraphrasing here, but that was the exact gist of it.)

The list of magazines to choose from showed about 120 middle-tier magazines, each marked with points rather than a price. Should I choose one title, it would get him 350 points closer to his dream. Another gets him only 200, and so on. The value in making the purchase had nothing to do with what the value of magazine might be to me and everything to do with helping this young man get out and see the world. In other words, the magazines had become mere props for a tax deductible donation.

What really happens to the money and to the points is beyond my ability to know, but I do know exactly what the purpose of his visit was. It existed simply as an effort to bait me into subscriptions to bolster the rate base of a series of publications that can't get the boost they need any other way.

To demonstrate just how fubar this exchange is, let's imagine the conversation went in a completely different way.

"Hello sir, I'm a young entrepreneur and I am here to convince you to buy one or more of these fine publications, that will, on their own merits, enrich your life and be worth every penny that you spend."

Yeah, hilarious.

No, the purpose of this exchange was to eke out a bump in subscriptions by any means necessary so these magazines could continue to justify to their dwindling advertisers the value of advertising with them.

But let's look more closely at that. Let's say for instance, that I had decided to take three subscriptions, one for me, one for my wife and one for a gift. Even though I am constantly bombarded with exposure to these titles, I haven't so far subscribed to them. I see them on magazine stands, in airport book stores, in doctors offices, but so far I have felt no need to spend the nearly nothing they are charging for the privilege of having them delivered to me.

In other words, I don't really want them. But I buy them anyway. And thousands others like me buy them too. And the kid gets his trip to Europe. And in large part the magazines are a waste of effort and resources. They sit in my car unread. My wife barely opens hers. I send the gift to my mother, who already subscribes to her favorite titles. The net result here is an utter waste of time. The magazines get made but we're not reading them. At least not in any way that is significant.

But, there was a small success here, right? The publications got that bump in subscriptions that kept them alive another season. Is that a success? I don't care for the publication. I don't read it loyally so I don't see the advertising. The advertisers don't get what they are paying for which is exposure to me. The edit keeps getting watered down to try and keep subscribers like me. And when it comes time to renew, I won't re-up and I won't ever subscribe to them again.

In fact, under one of my car seats right now is a copy of the February 2008 issue of a magazine that I subscribed to on a lark. It was free and it still hasn't been read. But it keeps at least one of my two-year-old children happy as they slowly shred it or stick the pages together with milk and raisins.

The real crime here is in the damage it does to entire industry. I love magazine publishing. It is an amazing thing to be a part of an incredible publication with devoted and loyal readers. Standing next to a massive web offset press as the paper flies through a process almost the length of a football field at a pace that can produce a million books in a 24 hour period has to be one of the marvels of the world. When it is your team that made the book, it is even more incredible. Working all night on an issue to get on a plane in the next few days and find a copy of it in a distant airport... beautiful. Color theory. Design. Market research. Audience loyalty. Good editing. Great photographs. The tactile quality of a well designed product in tune with its readers. All are amazing things.

But dumping your subscriptions masked in a charity case does nothing useful for anyone in the industry. If the kid gets the European vacation, I hope it changes his life. At least some good might come out of it. What I really dream is that he might come back and try and sell me something from a list of 120 magazines that are worth buying outright, just because they are so important to have.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Advertising and Edit Integrated

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This is part four in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

In the complete process of making and distributing traditional documentary photography and photojournalism, there is a series of exchanges that, each building on the previous, culminate in the performance of the images in front of a broader audience. There is first the recognition of an issue, condition or event, then the interaction between the photographer and the subject being depicted (photographs are made in specific times and in specific places), followed by the exchanges between photographer and publication in the editing and selecting of images for release, and then finally the interaction between the audience and the images themselves within the context of a publication. This final exchange is the culmination of all the previous interactions and has the most political impact. Here the image meets the audience, and the exchange determines the net political action of the images in the world.

The primary means of viewing photographs for the public has been through magazine publications first, then newspapers and now online. It is the magazine industry that has most refined its use of photography and lessons learned there can be applied to new models going forward.

To do this let us first establish a means of looking at a magazine as a whole. Any publication can be seen as an aesthetic object; complete, integrated and interrelated, with each page contributing to the overall effect on the reader. We must accept the magazine, newspaper or book in its entirety as an integrated object where advertising and edit are bound together and interrelated. How could it be otherwise, when the editorial and the advertising are interspersed, interlocked, and following similar visual rules? Even though you can flip through a magazine and separate the advertising from the editorial, you are still “reading” it all, and both influence you simultaneously.

The basic purpose of the advertising is to create, identify or amplify perceived deficiencies in the audience that the product or service being advertised can supposedly repair or complete.

Through a series of seemingly pragmatic business decisions, newspaper and magazine publishers have come to rely heavily on advertising for revenue. In a publicly traded publishing company requiring profitability for stock holders, growth targets are set by the corporate leadership, and the cost of missing your quarterly revenue goals can be significant, starting with job cuts and ending with magazine closures. Subscription sales generate very little net revenue, newsstand sales generate slightly more, but the majority of income comes from advertising sales. Magazines have increased this reliance on advertising by offering subscriptions at such low rates that they barely cover production costs, with the goal of increasing readership and thereby raising the advertising rates. With reduced subscription prices come market devaluations of the edit itself, and a need for broader appeal to try and retain casual subscribers who picked up the subscription on impulse. To put it bluntly, the editorial pages exist as a kind of bait, to bring in readers in numbers that generate a profitable advertising rate base.

Continue reading with Part Five.

Representing the Unrepresentable: Compassion and Empathy

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:00:00 +0000

This is part three in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Throughout the history of the human race, empathy has served a complex and difficult to articulate role in helping one person to assess, evaluate, or understand the nature of another's existence. Empathy has evolved to operate between people who are in physical proximity and therefore are capable of processing the huge volume of cues, both rational and irrational, that culminate in an overall sense of the condition of the other. When we are physically present with another person, a relationship is possible and empathy can serve a number of purposes in establishing and enhancing that interaction. Empathy evolved as a function of person-to-person contact.

We photographers frequently see ourselves as standing in for that physical interaction. If we insert ourselves relationally into the physical space of the subjects, we can carry the viewer with us and thus give the subject visibility and a public voice. However, when the subject is connected to the viewer through a photograph, the audience response becomes problematic. The empathic cues within a photograph are limited. There is not enough information to form a more complete perception of another person or group. Photographs also vary widely in their emotional content, and in a single series of photographs made in a short period of time of the same subject in the same location, it is possible to make images that vary widely in terms of the data that they communicate empathically to the viewer. Even within the relatively narrow constraints of straight photojournalism and documentary photography it is possible to make work that achieves a wide variety of emotional outcomes and it is frequently in the editing of the images where the specific emotional tone and argument of the image series is refined or clarified.

Through photographs we are not relating to whole people or places but to fragmented depictions of them, dislocated in time and space. These fragments of self, presented as photographic evidence of the human condition, perform for the audience on a spectrum ranging from the specific political to the general mythic. In this case the word ‘political’ is synonymous with the word ‘real’, it being a descriptor of actual events, people and places that exist in real time and are interconnected in real, if not easily depicted or understood ways.

Again, it is the nature of empathy itself that is the problem here. Evoking compassion is something that should be done with specific care for the political interaction between the image and the viewing audience.

Empathy as practiced from person to person offers the potential for human relationship, interaction and intervention, all under the influence of the empathic person. Empathy that is mediated through a photograph requires no avenue for action, and in fact the images may obscure the political realities, or point the viewer in the wrong direction, creating an environment where the viewing public is bombarded with empathic information in a media environment where meaningful actionable political responses are unavailable or obscured.

Most humanitarian documentary photographers and photojournalists will say that their intent is to reduce social injustices. The conventional wisdom is that by exposing audiences to photographs of injustice and inequity, they will be motivated towards compassion and will act to direct material or political aid towards those in need. The chief flaw in this strategy exists not in the audience or in the plight of the subjects but rather in the evidence and accuracy of actionable response to the images.

Events and problems of a global nature are created and sustained by complex human systems that resist easy interrogation. Solutions are pushed forward by specifically targeted political pressure. Merely raising awareness offers only the hope that the audience will find and create that pressure on its own, or that outrage will fuel further investment into inquiry and response. While these do occasionally happen, they are not reliable or even likely outcomes for many if not most of the problems that we face.

Continue reading with Part Four.

Blogging the Revolution, How We Could Help.

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:05:00 +0000

Baharestan Square and Parliament, Tehran (source: google maps)

-in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - persiankiwi

To follow the twitter streams coming out of Iran is to witness the birth of a new form of journalism that hasn't fully found its platform yet, but has moved forward into a vernacular territory that traditional journalism avoids. The streams are full of humanity; joy, exhilaration, fear, pain, resolve, despair. It's an incredible form that locates itself somewhere between poetry and journalism, with fact and feeling wrapped up together. I am amazed at the outpouring of support for Iranian bloggers from readers all over the world.

Twitter streams are being quoted all over the MSM, with CNN re-posting a number of them verbatim, lacking any other sources to work with. The paradox here is that anonymous sources are the least trusted in journalism, specifically because there is no one to hold accountable for the information. In the case of Iranian bloggers, the anonymity is necessary, but that doesn't remove the problem of anonymity in general. However, the rules are a little different in social media circles. There are people who post regularly through anonymous names but who establish credibility through their consistence and authenticity of voice.

Iranian bloggers are risking their lives to send out information from Iran and we owe it to them to do the most we can to understand and utilize that information in a meaningful way. And they are doing this in the most public of ways through social media. We have to trust that the information that they are risking their lives to send out is important enough to them to send it, and therefore important enough for us to do something with it. Some of the information is general, as in "We have just returned and outside the city sky is full of teh sounds of 'Allah Akbar' from ppls on balconys -" and some of it is more specific, as in "in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar - ."

What is lacking is a map that weaves together these social media narratives in a specific way and anchors them in a time and place. Imagine an image stream that would accept cell phone photographs and video with gps data attached and plug them into a google map of Tehran so that protesters with cell phones who have images worth the risk of sending would have a platform for them to be seen in the geographical context of their origin. Imagine an event where images are streaming in with attached gps data, filling points on a map where they were taken, giving viewers on the web a flood of information that is anchored to a specific time and place. Then the maps could be sorted by days and a narrative of events would emerge that has no beginning or end, but is a matrix of information, with photographs overlapping and corroborating each other from multiple sources. It is no longer about the specific image so much as about the flow. This would bypass MSM channels and go straight to the platform from which you would see it. It would be hard for any government to ignore this kind of information.

The technology exists. A lot of the stories and images are already in circulation. It's just a question of how to put them all together.

Persiankiwi is in Trouble

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:53:00 +0000

For those who have been following the twitter streams coming out of Iran, persiankiwi has been one of the lead sources of information since the election. So far his/her/their twitter stream has been infused with excitement, potential and hidden dangers, as if these were furtive dispatches in a Matrix like underground resistance, tapping in and out of the web to upload small bits and direct traffic towards some useful end. The violence was in the background and the message was of movement and hope.

And now this today. The blunt end of trauma. The last few hours in chronological order:

just in from Baharestan Sq - situation today is terrible - they beat the ppls like animals -

I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war -

they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals

saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - she had no defense nothing - #Iranelection sure that she is dead

so many ppl arrested - young & old - they take ppl away -

ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting - from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys

all shops was closed - nowhere to go - they follow ppls with helicopters - smoke and fire is everywhere

phone line was cut and we lost internet - #Iranelection - getting more difficult to log into net -

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users - must move from here now - #Iranelection

reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq - now - #Iranelection - Sea of Green - Allah Akbar

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat - blood everywhere - like butcher - Allah Akbar -

they catch ppl with mobile - so many killed today - so many injured - Allah Akbar - they take one of us

they pull away the dead into trucks - like factory - no human can do this - we beg Allah for save us -

Everybody is under arrest & cant move - Mousavi - Karroubi even rumour Khatami is in house guard

we must go - dont know when we can get internet - they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names - now we must move fast -

thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green - pls remember always our martyrs - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar - Allah Akbar

Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar -

The last line sounds like a bendiction. The tone has changed dramatically and if these reports are true, I fear that this a turning point in the revolution. Either the violence just caught up to persiankiwi, or the militia attacks on demonstrators have become much more dramatic. When a government decriminalizes and encourages civic violence towards members of its own population, the results can be horrifying beyond imagination. So far the protest movement tried to position itself as peaceful. But passive resistance only works in the end when the crowd has no stomach to continue the violence. Ghandi won in India because the British public could no longer stand the violence that was being perpetrated in its name. But when the ruling, armed, supporters of the government not only support the violence but actively participate in it, passive resistance will be met with more brutality as in Tibet.

There is enough evidence from reports on western platforms such as the BBC to indicate that there are preparations to step up the violence and use the five day extension granted to protest the election results to smash the resistance before Ahmadinejad is finally declared the winner.

Whatever the situation on the ground in Tehran, persiankiwi's reports ring with pathos and clarity. To emphasize just how far we are here in the West from what is happening in Tehran, take a look at PDN's photo of the day.

ed note: I have posted a proposal of how we could create a new platform to help weave together the many narratives that coming out of Tehran through social media. You can find it here.

Representing the Unrepresentable: The Mythic and the Real

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

This is part two in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

Central to the practice of making pictures of disaster, suffering, catastrophe and the large events of our time is photography’s unique relationship to the real. One of the products of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, and the concurrent advances in science, is the idea that there is a real world, one that is measurable in distinct times and places. It is empirical and is distinguished by facts and data. This real world also exists separately from the mythic or the general. Photography plays a unique role in bridging these two worlds, trading in both and using one to exert pressure on the other. At no other time in history have we so easily and so convincingly been able to exchange the mythic for the real and back again.

Neither the mythic nor the political are more true than the other. Instead they each possess a different kind of truth—truths that are not interchangeable and do not necessarily lead in the same directions or to the same conclusions. Mythic truths exist in the general sense. For example, in the myth of Icarus, there are truths about the nature of hubris and the dangers of assuming too much of one’s own abilities. However, we would never in a post-enlightenment world imagine the story to be factually or politically true, even though we can recognize the general truths contained in it. Conversely, a Congressional budget report contains great amounts of specific and highly political information that has little mythic value at all.

Since photographs have an indexical quality, on an intrinsic level they cannot be ‘real’ but instead become markers, signposts and fragments of the real. Once a photograph is taken, and it is indeed taken, it is dislocated from its source and becomes a kind of stored data that has the potential to re-impact the real when encountered by a viewer. In the viewing a photograph is realized in its performance for the audience. While photographs are indeed relics and records of the past, they are fixed, and therefore perform perpetually in the present.

Work that serves to make the viewer more aware of this exchange is profoundly political, for it engages the viewer in a process of experiencing a media depiction of the subject matter while drawing attention to the media itself, concurrently drawing the viewer towards an understanding and/or experience of the means and the mechanisms of that viewer-image exchange.

In so far as the real world political realities, both the problems and their potential solutions, from which the images are taken and the subsequent performances of the images for the viewing public are compatible, then the work has achieved a kind of fidelity. As the images steer the viewer towards the general and the mythic, they enhance the dislocated character of the information and can create viewing experiences that are largely removed, both in content and quality, from the real events from which they came. When the subject of such work is traumatic, we have to ask ourselves in a pragmatic sense what is to be gained by depicting it. What are the moral implications and outcomes for the audience who is viewing trauma and destruction? Even more important, what are the implications for the subjects depicted? Is their trauma addressed in any specific or realized way?

Continue reading with Part Three.

Representing the Unrepresentable: A Waking Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:00:00 +0000

This is part one in series of posts adapted from a paper titled Representing the Unrepresentable: Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange that I read at the Aesthetics of Catastrophe symposium at Northwestern University. Each post stands alone, but the series is best read as a whole starting here.

September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Rwandan Genocide, Global Warming, the Genocide in Darfur, Pollution in China, the Collapse of Yugoslavia and Balkan War Crimes, Global Poverty, Local Poverty, Conflict Diamonds, Rape in the Congo, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. These are just some of the recent larger issues that face contemporary life in the west. They are also the subjects of countless photo essays that work to seek some kind of public impact and or political change. The faces of these issues in America are largely based on photographs that present the immediate manifestations and visual evidence of problems that are inherently political in nature. Photographs too easily deal with the consequences while leaving the complex nature of their causes invisible and out of the frame.

Large scale human events emerge out of histories and systems that traverse the globe in messy, complex ways, involving political interactions and structures that we may barely recognize, even though we are directly witnessing the results of their machinations. The photographs of these issues that perform as witness for the public are also created and distributed by systems and structures that are largely invisible, but are responsible for shaping public perception with significant political consequences. At the same time, rapid developments in photo technology have unleashed the production of photographs in numbers that are unknown but that must be in the trillions.

In Wim Wenders' beautiful, epic, 280 minute film Until the End of the World, Dr. Farber has made an electronic machine that can electronically project images directly into the brain, effectively restoring sight to his blind wife. She is able to see with a pair of electronic goggles wired to her head, transmitting video images into her visual cortex. This is an incredible development for her. The characters spend much energy and time bringing video of their shared lives so she can catch up on the visuals that she has been missing.

They soon discover that the machine is also capable of the reverse process. Images can be recorded directly from the brain and played back on a screen for the viewer to watch in real time, making it possible to record one's dreams and then watch them back while awake. Soon, most of the characters find themselves completely addicted to looking at images from their dreams, spending their days watching ghostly pictures on static filled computer screens, peering into real world depictions of their mysterious inner lives while the world outside increasingly threatens with isolation, mass destruction and environmental collapse. When the film was first released in 1991, this seemed like an esoteric tale. Now a mere 18 years later, it is prescient in its understanding of how images can captivate and take us over.

The rapid development of digital technology has made possible the making and distribution of photographs on a scale and in a volume that was inconceivable mere decades ago. We are arriving at another version of Wender’s film, one where we can consume images on a monitor continuously, unconsciously seeking out those images that reinforce our own social, psychological and cultural understanding. Instead of the dream becoming manifest in the real, as it does in the film where dreams are transmuted into pixel data and ultimately images on a screen, we have the real being converted into a flood of images that are disconnected from the political realities of their origins and used to perform in service to other political entities and distribution engines, whether they be magazines and newspapers, social media, governments, individuals, media outlets, or any other entity that finds a use for them.

Rather than informing, a process that often must involve a formal restructuring of information, these images too often reinforce and reify stereotypes and stigmas, even when doing so with the best of intentions. We are entering a period of time where we are collectively joining a kind of waking dream, producing and consuming images at a pace and in a volume that defies reflection. We are swept along, directed by social, cultural and business concerns that, through a process of rewards and punishments, continue shaping the foundations of the way we understand our world. To create new political outcomes in our image making, we must direct change not only to the images themselves, but also to those structures that shape and deliver them.

Continue reading with Part Two.

Prouty on Iran

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:03:00 +0000

Richard Prouty has written an excellent series of posts on his blog One Way Street following and examining the social media coverage coming out of Iran. For thoughtfulness and historical perspective, it is among the best coverage I've read so far. And he is equally nimble with both Twitter and Foucault.

Some Things New

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:50:00 +0000

It has been a busy couple of months behind the scenes here. There will be much to roll out in the next weeks and months, including a summer serial for 2009. Stay tuned.

And to kick things off...

New pictures, old pictures, more pictures.

An all new website.

Symposium: Aesthetics of Catastrophe

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:39:00 +0000

Northwestern University
Friday, June 5, 2009
Annie May Swift Hall Auditorium

This symposium addresses questions of visual representation and public advocacy as they are evident in contemporary economic, environmental, and political disasters. Events such as floods, fires, terrorism, and genocide generate heightened media coverage, compelling images, and questions about the limits of photographic representation of events that involve massive disruption and loss. In the US, a series of disasters including 9/11, Katrina, and the economic crash have pushed photojournalists and media scholars alike to ask whether the available conventions for documentary witness need to be extended or reworked. This symposium provides images and arguments dedicated to provoking and guiding extended discussion of topics such as the violent image, visual fragmentation and political distribution, emergency status and citizenship, and the iconography of a “catastrophile” society.

Schedule:

9:00 – Coffee

9:30 – Ann Larabee, Michigan State University, “Brownfields, Ghostboxes, and Orange Xs: Reading Disaster and Catastrophe in the Urban Landscape”

10:45 – Robert Lyons, Photographer, “Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide”

1:00 – David Campbell, Durham University, UK, “Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza”

2:15 – Aric Mayer, Photographer, “Representing the Unrepresentable: Disaster, Suffering, and Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange”

3:30 – Lane Relyea, Northwestern University, “From Spectacle to Database: On the Changed Status of Debris and Fragmented Subjectivity in Recent Art Culture”

4:45 – Reception

Free and open to the public. Organized by Robert Hariman. Sponsored by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the School of Communication, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University. For more information, please contact Patrick Wade at wpatrickwade@gmail.com.

Save the Date

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:55:00 +0000

Friday, June 12, 2009
7:00 PM – 9:30 PM

Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Presents the Sixth in a Series

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Visual Art: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe; Hurricane Katrina
Photographs by Aric Mayer with Poetry by Rebecca Meredith

“Going into New Orleans, I carried with me the knowledge that I was entering someone else's city and that I had a responsibility to do something there that might be of value long after the immediate crisis had stabilized. My goal was to create a large body of photographs that crossed the city, carrying the viewer directly into this apocalyptic landscape. Only here, instead of explosions and fire, the more usual metaphors of destruction, this was an apocalypse of water, which is a very different thing. Throughout Western history, water has been a symbol of the unconscious, of the indwelling unrecognized forces and agencies that operate beneath the surface of our conscious lives. This is a fitting metaphor, for we are still untangling and discovering the unseen political and social influences that contributed to the disaster.”

Aric Mayer, from Aesthetics of Catastrophe, Public Culture v 20.2, Duke University

Aric Mayer is a Kenyan born US based artist and filmmaker. He was the main photographer covering Hurricane Katrina for the Wall Street Journal. Mayer's post-Katrina landscapes were exhibited in a solo exhibition at Gallery Bienvenu in New Orleans to commemorate the first anniversary of the storm, and have been published in numerous journals and magazines. He is a member of the board of directors of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Rebecca Meredith is a senior clinical associate at SPSI. Her poems about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the area in which she grew up, the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans, have appeared in print in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.

ARTIST: Aric Mayer, M.F.A.
POET: Rebecca Meredith, M.A.
DISCUSSANT: Susan Radant, Ph.D.

PROGRAM: Wine and cheese social, 7:00 – 7:30 PM; presentation, 7:30 – 9:30 PM

LOCATION: Seattle Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. For details, please register to reserve your place.

REGISTRATION: Space is limited; early registration is strongly encouraged. Please RSVP to SPSI in care of Susan Radant, Ph.D., (206) 282-2382, or by email at sradant@u.washington.edu. Please include your phone number and email address.

· For more information about Aric Mayer, please visit: http://aricmayerstudios.com/
· For more information about the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute: www.spsi.org

It has been quiet here...

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:52:00 +0000

... on the blog for the past few weeks. I dusted off my beloved Mont Blanc and have been writing with ink on paper and reading actual books. It feels great. I'll be back to posting soon.

Earthlink Down on Earthday

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:04:00 +0000

As of sometime just after 6:55 AM, PST, all my Earthlink services, which include webhosting, email and ftp, are down and continue to be down. The Earthlink site itself is unresponsive and no one is picking up their customer service phone lines. A look around the chat rooms of several network blogs indicates that this is a nation wide outage. Yet I haven't been able to find any real reporting on the issue. Earthlink reports in a recorded message to a user in San Diego that there is a power outage in Pasadena and that their backup generator has failed. Whatever the cause, a major ISP seems to have completely gone offline.

Test emails that I sent to myself from a non-Earthlink account have not yet been returned as undeliverable so there is hope that all is not lost. But this is already a big problem and is getting bigger for Earthlink customers.

Earthlink needs to get some information out to users fast before this snowballs into an open rebellion against them. Sitting in the dark while your products are offline is a bad customer experience and the tone of the conversation is getting worse as the lack of information continues.

The Content Bubble

noreply@blogger.com (Aric Mayer) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:20:00 +0000

Magazine and newspaper revenues are dropping like bison off of a cliff. Newspapers such as the Seattle PI are fleeing to the internet. Finding that advertising has failed them, some publications are stripping down to make last ditch efforts at online business models, where their only current hope of revenue is...drum roll please...advertising. Not good.

Since the dawn of Google ad revenue, internet gurus have been telling us that the future of everything lay in generating more traffic*. That thinking is reminiscent of the kind of thinking that created Dow, 30,000. Quick money or a quick audience is intoxicating, and it breeds an optimism that is hard to resist. But whatever it looks like, gravity never falls up. Read here why the New York Times, which pays good hard cash to create complex graphics and designs, doesn't want blogs freely reproducing that content just to get in-bound web links. Web traffic alone isn't all that it is cracked up to be.

And the fundamental laws of supply and demand still apply.

"Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are built into her laptop. So from a very strict Econ 101 basis, you have the ability to create virtually unlimited supply against what has been historically relatively stable demand." via adage. (Thanks Rob.)

Previous economic models in publishing relied on what we understand to be true models of supply and demand. Somewhere in the middle, the supply and demand curves intersect at a profitable exchange. X amount of product sold at Y price = optimized revenues.

Introduce the internet, where publishing is easy and cheap, and the supply curve runs straight to infinity. You can guess what happens to demand--it goes straight to "give it to me for free."

We have seen two recent major deviations into the economic twilight zone. First in the tech bubble and then the housing bubble. In each, all sensible readings of economics were thrown out the window, and each led to a major crash. This current publishing crisis is the content bubble. The upside down logic of online content distribution has said, 'give it away for free and you will later find a way to capitalize on web traffic.' Or, 'increasing your traffic will lead to increasing ad sales and increasing revenue.' If you substitute the word 'subscribers' for the word 'traffic' you get the same logic that is bringing down the print publishing industry overall.

The new logic will have to be: give a little of your content away for free, as bait, and charge for the rest. In other words, use a little of your own content as advertising for the rest of it that is protected for subscriber or paid use only. I currently pay $9.95 a month for The Wall Street Journal online. And it is worth it. I would happily pay as much or more for the New York Times online. And we will, or we won't be reading it any longer. Either they will charge for and protect their content, or they will go out of business. That goes for the rest of the publishing world. Publications are going to have to create scarcity as a fundamental ingredient for profitability. Making content that is desirable, useful, or valuable, enough to be worth a price is the starting point. Making it scarce enough that consumers will pay to get to it will make it profitable.

*more traffic = higher ad exposure = increased revenue. Read here where I detail how a permutation of that logic is failing the print model. And here at The Big Money where they say the same thing several weeks later and name some more names.