film screening will occur
IN CLASS on Oct. 31, so there will be a full 2 ½ hour class. There will
be no homework except to work on your group projects. An update on your
project is due on November
7
We need to schedule a field
trip to Holocaust Museum between Nov. 7 and 14. Are -weekends OK?
Our next class will meet in
Symonds I, 2nd floor of Fondren
Pick up graded work after
class; will email you individual comments on group presentations
Debate: To what extent
does digital photography extend how reality can be represented? What
are the responsibilities of a photographer in working with these tools?
Discuss: How do people
represent themselves online? What's up with web-cams?
Early dismissal (8:45ish)
so that you have time to work in your project groups.
Kenneth Brower: “Digital
photofakery is likely to be pernicious also, in the long run, to the
continued good will of photography's audience. Photography and the
public have an unusual compact. "The camera does not lie" is a proposition
that most of us know to be false yet we half believe anyway. This
is a dynamic unique in the arts. The "willing suspension of disbelief"
that Coleridge detected at the heart of poetic faith becomes in photographic
faith a nearly automatic suspension. Once betrayed, this sort of uncomplicated
belief goes quickly past willing to unwilling.”
Pedro Meyer: "I believe
photography has taken on a new lease on life, finding itself at new
crossroads where the documentary image as well as the artistic expression
will evolve on to new levels of magnetic attraction, where the image
will be distributed in ways never seen of heard of before, telling
the same old stories of mankind if you will, but in so many new ways
that we shall find renewed inspirations. That is why for me this is
the Renaissance of Photography."
Pedro Meyer: “When geometry
and content miss their original appointment, I can try to make up
for such a lost encounter. I can, like a gold miner, go back to all
my old archives and find countless new veins and find new uses for
my previous work. I can publish upon demand. With ease I can erase
scratches which would have defied the artistry of the most sophisticated
retouches. For these and a thousand other reasons too many too enumerate,
the computer is, if not a savoir, at least an excellent tool to mitigate
our limitations and to expand our expressive potential” (111).
Peter Lunenfeld: "Even
when we are not sure how these images differ from the real, they induce
a twinge not unlike the pain of a phantom limb. Like photography in
the 19th century, electronic imagery is a constant irritant, a challenge
to inherited epistemology."
But what about Meyer's
recent warning: “Be wary of what you see” (http://zonezero.com/)
Web Cams:
Is reality TV overtaking
the function of traditional photography? Consider Will Larson's statement:
“What was once securely factual is now factually ambiguous and the
mantel of truth-telling seems to have fallen closer to video, with
the immediacy of the ever-present camcorder, surveillance technology,
real-time recording and live broadcasting, while drifting steadily
away from the now suspect still image.”
