viz. - counterculture

Commercial and Cooperative Subjectivities: Does an Independent Lens See Differently?

Laura Thain — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:09:05 +0000

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."--Robert Capa, founding member of Magnum. d. 1954, landmine accident

Currently on exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center is a carefully curated selection of Magnum photos, drawing from the organization’s archive housed at the Center. Magnum, an elite professional photographic cooperative, brings together some of the world’s premiere photographers in a collaboration resistant to the commercial demands of photojournalism. This week on viz., we’ll feature the exhibit and explore issues central to visual argumentation and mass media. This post will explore what possibilities arise when photographers become their own producers and distributors—what influence do the conditions of production have on the genre of photojournalism itself?

AUDIENCE Many photojournalists speak of the “poster effect”—a bold, central image and a clean, contrasting background. The “poster effect” assumes a disinterested, distracted audience who must be coaxed into viewing the image amidst a complex matrix of visual competition. Below is an example of the "poster" effect. This image, taken by DC freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, was used by Shepard Fairey (without permission) in the iconic Obama HOPE poster.

Image Credit: The Online Photographer

The Magnum photos arguably make different assumptions about a general audience—at the heart of the organization's ethos is the belief that people are interested in the depiction of human experiences and events. Reading this audience in good faith, a condition which is possible only when we remove photography from its commercialized context, opens up artistic possibilities. Below, Inge Morath plays with the convention of "poster" photography by including a posed photograph alongside a boy cobbling shoes in Iran.

Image Credit: Perceptive Travel

I was struck by how seldom Magnum photographs relied on the conventions of high art to communicate their message. Instead, I observed tactics that subtly drew attention to photography as a medium rather than as an unmediated experience. These compositional techniques showed respect for a mass audience and assumed they wanted more than a photograph that exactly replicated experience. Rather, these photographs meditate on what it means to capture an experience at all.

From Henri Cartier-Bresson's series The Great Leap Foward. Image Credit: Personal Photograph.

COMPOSITION These photographs often resist the “poster effect” and instead include jarring edges, multiple centers of movement, and background that resists its position vis a vis the foreground. Below, Burt Glen plays with photographic convention to depict integration in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

TECHNIQUE Rather than creating “true-to-life” images, the Magnum photographs are often interested in using the camera lens to see beyond the naked eye. In so doing, they often highlight the limits of both the camera and of visual memory. Below, Erich Hartmann photographs data output of an IBM voice recognition study in an attempt to visualize sound.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

MEDIATION Unconventional cropping, composition, and photographic technique bring attention to the photograph as a medium, rather than a transparent window into experience. They challenge the idea that photography represents memory and suggest that our cognition, rather, has shifted with the advent of photography. While commercial photojournalism often capitalizes on the relationship between human memory and photography, presenting photography as an artifact of memory an therefore memory available for consumption, the Magnum photos challenge the assumptions underpinning “photorealism” (that is, that a painting of a photograph is as close to the real scene as a painting of the scene itself). By daring to bring attention to the medium of photography itself, the Magnum photos seem to suggest that the photographic has altered our perception of memory, rather than the other way around.

Below, Paul Fusco depicts Robert Kennedy's funeral train by using an unconventional f-stop setting to depict the movement of the train.

Image Credit: Agnostica

THE PERSISTANCE OF THE COMMERCIAL Despite all the ways in which the Magnum photos resist the conventions and assumptions of commercial photojournalism, the commercial persists. Magnum's experiments in the digital acknowledge competitition from new media as a driving inspirational force. And human experience itself cannot, of course, avoid the commercial as a formative part of cultural experience. Magnum photos often play with commercial conventions in order to make subtle statements through the photographic medium itself. For instance, Muhammad Ali's fist here is the real celebrity. Its owner is merely relegated to the background.

Image Credit: Roberta Cucchario

We hope you will enjoy the rest of the week's post on the Ransom Center's exhibition and offer us your own thoughts about the intersections between photography, visual rhetoric, and the digital age.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Girl Power: Taylor Swift beyond The Waves

Laura Thain — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Harper’s Bazaar

This blog post started as a conversation in the break room here at the DWRL. After a discussion of the subversive, alternative female artists of the 90s—not only in band formulation like Riot Grrl or Bikini Kill but especially the singer/songwriters who dominated top 40 radio: Alanis Morissette, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple—someone mused, “Where have all the angry girls gone?”

I can’t say I like the answer. The angry girls have been billed as terrorists (MIA) or criminals (Fiona Apple). Some girls perform anger in a way that only weakly resonates with the general public (Miley Cyrus). But the angry girl has also been rebranded. The inevitable subsumption of alternative culture by the mainstream has cloaked our angry girl in airy dresses with flowing tresses and the voice of an angel to deliver the proverbial “fuck you.” I am, of course, referring to the girl who’s on the cover of every magazine this week as she promotes her new album Red. So hey girl hey, Taylor Swift—this week’s post goes out to you as I explore the paradoxical relationship between the underground and the mainstream, which emerge and subsume and emerge again in a cycle as endless as the couple on the verge of reconciliation (really! I think so!) in “We are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

So how do we get from Courtney Love to Taylor Swift? Perhaps we might take a look at one of my favorite pieces of concert memorabilia—the sparkly heart barrette sold during Hole’s Live Through This tour.

Image Credit: Tastingsin's Tumblr

Live Through This dropped merely four days after the death of Love’s husband Kurt Cobain, an event many music critics identify as crucial to Nirvana’s transition from underground to mainstream popularity. Certainly we can read Barthes’ Death of the Author into the cultural narrative here, but let us defer that question and focus on the larger movement of grunge and punk rock into what I will call the “stadium rock” sphere in the mid ‘90s—that is, that the initial countercultural impulses of grunge and punk become incorporated into the sphere of mass culture. Hole’s second album serves as an important piece of rhetorical evidence for this. It is drastically more accessible than the first and received acclaim from popular and alternative music critics alike.

There are two ways we might read the heart, which was sold in large quantities throughout the Live Through This tour. We might read it as an ironic statement on Love’s part; that is, that Love is attempting to show her distaste for traditional cultural mores of gender and femininity by expressing her identity in an exaggeratingly feminine object. (The more popular version of the barrette came in hot pink.) The cover of Live Through This seems to affirm this reading:

Image Credit: Amazon

But the mechanism is not purely ironic. As Erika Reinstein famously said in what has come to be known as the Riot Grrrl Manifesto (published in a ‘zine in ’92)

“BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US. We are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped, decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored, stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.”

Love’s incorporation of the barrette can be seen, I think, as a reclaiming of femininity on women’s own terms; that women should feel free to take back the domestic or the feminine as a willing and willful act, not as an act of subversion of subservience. The precondition for this, as Reinstein argues, is a self-designated, self-created feminine space.

But as that space became defined by powerful, “angry” female vocalists of the ‘90s, the line between ironic or self-designated participation in the feminine and the feminine space as inferior or restrictive (i.e. a patriarchally defined feminine space) became, in my view, increasingly blurred. Once female-defined, female-inhabited spaces became available for mass consumption, the mechanisms of popular culture transformed Hole’s barrette into a face-value gesture. The anger regarding and demand for social justice, especially for women, transforms into a more palatable “women scorned” motif. Thus, the danger of female anger is contained by means of isolation; by individualizing it (Swift’s endless parade of breakup songs) rather than generalizing it. A breakup, after all, is something we “get over.”

So finally, I’d like make some particular comments on Taylor Swift’s visit to Ellen:

The video has earned Swift some heat for being “humorless,” especially about the central theme of her songwriting—her breakups. (An ecard recently made the internet rounds, expressing “Taylor Swift, maybe you’re the problem.”) But as much as I might object to a particular brand of singer/songwriter that I think Swift represents—the woman who, despite the plethora of social injustices against women that exist, chooses to use her potentially empowering anger to wax generic on winning at breakups—the idea that Swift is obligated to make her personal life available for public consumption for daring to aestheticize her feelings is the worse offense. So although I think we might read Swift as complicit in a tired out old narrative that sanitizes “girl power” into something ultimately less threatening than the demand for social justice, complicit with patriarchal ideas of femininity or not, she can never deserve to be subject to them.