It’s really, really hard to write about yourself, photograph yourself, or film yourself without annoying people, but Ross McElwee somehow has a knack for it. Sherman’s March is a must-Netflix, if you haven’t already. Now Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care, Next Friday, Paul Blart: Mall Cop) wants to turn it into a film. Now, when McElwee was shooting every minute of his life in the last 70s and early 80s, it was extremely bizarre, today, it wouldn’t alarm anyone. Given this, I really hope Carr uses the opportunity to reflect on our over-cameraed era.
Family Portraits of all 56 ethnic groups in China. (via.)
When I visited post-Katrina New Orleans a couple years ago, my friend/tourguide laughed when I asked if various construction projects around town were due to the hurricane. He told me there were plenty of scaffolding and yellow cones before the storm, and afterward, well, some of the builders found themselves eligible for various government grants and assistance. Here’s Thomas Morton in Vice seeing something similar in Detroit ruin photography (via.) “The city’s second-most-overused blight shot is of the mile-long ruins of the Packard Auto Plant in East Detroit. ‘This is the visiting reporters’ favorite thing to see,’ [photographer] James [Griffioen] said. ‘The people all come here to shoot the story of the auto industry and they love this shot because they can be like, ‘See that? That’s where they made the cars,’ and then forget to add the footnote that the plant’s been closed since 1956.’”
Urban Outfitters sells Diana+ cameras and now, Olivetti typewriters (via.) Their electronics section is full of replicas vintage payphones. Should we call this aesthetic “nostalgia tech”?
“Releasing additional photographs would not be telling us anything that we don’t already know. We don’t need to see a picture to know that American interrogators used waterboarding — a crime our military has prosecuted as torture for more than a century — when we can see former Vice President Dick Cheney taking credit for having people waterboarded… Crime-scene photographs, for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict. Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation.” – Philip Gourevitch (via.) Jane Mayer made a stronger point on On The Media last week, “Another possibility exists too, though, that – that if you don’t actually release the documents, it leaves open to the human imagination what the United States was doing. And sometimes the imagination is even worse than the reality. I mean, if, in fact, these pictures are less bad than those at Abu Ghraib, then maybe they can put to rest rumors.”
Nothing gets your self-absorption flowing quite like sitting for a portrait. (via.)
I completely empathize with Conscientious blogger Jörg Colberg, whose site was down for most of this week (he set up Conscientious in Limbo in the meantime.) We’ve had a number of 500 errors over the past month which have significantly dropped traffic over the past month. Has something to do with the way wordpress is archiving posts, but we’re still looking into it. It is kind of like if you learned every 100th book you sell if empty pages. But even worse as it is less obvious an error — web browsers tend not to go back to where they were led, if a site isn’t there the first time.
Video is Justice
I dragged the text file that was Cell Phone Camera Forever out of the trash before posting it last January, because I was second-guessing up to that moment whether it wasn’t too obvious or incoherent. Since then, it is still one of the most popular posts on this website. It seems none of us quite know what to make of our cheap, immediate access to creating media. Does anyone really want, what Momus called, a “1:1 ratio of experience to writing” (replace “writing” with your media of choice)?
A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.
I need to revise the ultimate point in that post. A camera can be an interruption, it can create a barrier between you and the moment in your life you mean to be enjoying. Mrs. Tulip give a great example of this:
Two schools I have taught at in the past couple of years ban camera use at their high school musical night. One of the reasons is because students look out to the audience to see if mum and dad are watching. If they see only a sea of lenses instead of adoring eyes they are met with technology rather than soul.
We are obsessed with recording life from our point of view, even when it is only 30 cm from the next person’s POV. The Mona Lisa is photographed by every visitor to the Lourve when we have ready access to pristine images of her taken in optimum lighting etc.
We humans are strange creatures.
But the ubiquity of pocket-size video and point-and-shoot cameras is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted. It brings people to justice.
By now you may have seen the horrific footage of London police assaulting 47-year-old newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work by the g20 protests before he was attacked, had a heart attack, and died. (More.) The video was filmed by a bystander who “attended the protests near the Bank of England out of curiosity.”
While there was some whispering on Twitter and message boards that Tomlinson was beaten with a truncheon, until the video was released, his weak heart seemed to suffice as the cause of death.
Most people generally trust that while authorities aren’t angels, they don’t act widely out of character. It just doesn’t make sense that they might beat, to the point of possibly inducing a heart attack, an old man who doesn’t even look like he was protesting anything. Well, now you can see for yourself.
If you are at all interested in the subject of sousveillance for human rights, take a look at WITNESS. The organization was founded in 1992, the year after George Holliday heard commotion outside his apartment and took his brand new camcorder to record police savagely beating Rodney King. The odds of having a camcorder on hand, (let alone at all) were pretty slim fifteen years ago. But today nearly everyone can document an abuse of power as it happens.
[By the way, Massachusetts has an obscenely antiquated law against what it calls "wiretapping," “intended . . . to prohibit all secret recordings by members of the public, including recordings of police officers or other public officials interacting with members of the public, when made without their permission or knowledge.” I believe New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have similar laws. Stupid, unjust, and yet on the books.]
Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series.
Update 4/17/09: Very interesting response from William Shaw at RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre blog: “having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldn’t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney King’s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.”
MeetTheFamous.com, where everyone with a camera and celebrity in site can be paparazzi (and get paid!– $5 for every 1,000 pageviews.) More from WaPo. (via.)
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