Post Photography AK 2100 Oct. 26, 2005 Robert Jackson, 1964 Post Photography AK 2100 George Mahlberg. Oswald/Ruby as a Rock Band, 1996 1
Robert Burgoyne Cinema as the language through which reality expresses itself - an idea now under attack. Contemporary cinema an expression of the hyperreal, rather than the real Bazin: realism of cinema part of its relation to the physical world No longer the case today. Loss of ethical and moral dimension Examples of JFK and Forest Gump: mix of fictional and archival scenes Robert Burgoyne Thomas Elsaesser: future generations will never be able to tell fact from fiction, having media as material evidence. Uncertain relationship between memory and history Origins, authenticity and documentation: traditional sense of history. Challenged in the digital domain Prosthetic memory: memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based but are still experience by one s own body by means of cultural technologies Potentially dangerous? Gump, JFK etc. literalize concept of prosthetic memory. Offer experiential relation to history 2
Robert Burgoyne Cinema to be an instrument that allows individuals to experience a bodily, mimetic encounter with a collective past they never actually led In contemporary media culture, historical events are transformed into experiences Wag the Dog sequence Forest Gump scenes: George Wallace Lyndon Johnson John Lennon John Kennedy Wag the Dog 3
Forest Gump: George Wallace Forest Gump: John Kennedy 4
Forest Gump: John Lennon Forest Gump: Birth of a Nation 5
Forest Gump: Johnson, making of Quote from Robert Burgoyne article To consider the documentary images of the history of the 20th century, what most people consider to be the audio-visual record of the recent past, as simply part of the image bank, material available for poetic or metaphoric use, challenges our sense of the sacrosanct nature of the document, which as Ricœur points out, "marks a dividing line between history and fiction. But in fact, this form of visual history, one that uses documentary images in the service of storytelling that freely mixes fictional, factual, and speculative discourses, gives us a history of the future that is in some ways very like the mythic histories of the past. Perhaps, for future generations, the distinction between fact and fiction as presented in the media will no longer matter because a whole new genre of visual history, or history as vision, will have emerged with its own rules, its own regimes of credibility, and its own sort of truth. For them, and perhaps even for us, documentary images may no longer signify the facticity of past events, per se, but rather convey the sense that they are a representation of the past, a representation that may be employed for the purpose of metaphor, irony, analogy, or argument, and that may be used in such a way that a certain poetic truth may emerge in the telling. 6
Manipulation and Illusion - a few examples Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths, 1917. Many believe that their photos of faeries were authentic Manipulation and Illusion - a few examples Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths, 1917. Many believe that their photos of faeries were authentic 7
Manipulation and Illusion - a few examples Robert Fenton, 1855, The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Additional cannon balls were added for dramatic effect Manipulation and Illusion - a few examples Oscar Gustave Rejlander, 1857. Street Urchins tossing chestnuts. Stop action photography was not possible at this time. The effect was created by using a fine thread to suspend the chestnut 8
Joe Rosenthal, Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Feb., 1945 Not the picture of the original flag raising, which was thwarted by a Japanese soldier tossing a grenade. The two images on the right show the first flag being raised and then being taken down again in order to make room for the second flag. March 2003: During Gulf War II, the Los Angeles Times ran the photo on top on its front page on March 31. It was a composite of the two lower photos. Photographer Brian Walski was dismissed two days later. http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html 9
June 1994: Newsweek's straight photo and a Time "photo illustration" http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html December 1997: Newsweek gives Mama McCaughey a makeover. http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html 10
February 1982: The pyramids were moved closer together to accommodate this vertical National Geographic cover. http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html Nov. 2000: Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro did meet in New York, but no photographer was present. So the Daily News just faked this photo. February 2003: Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush did not debate, but appeared to in this cover shot. http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html 11
= + http://www.sree.net/teaching/photoethics.html Peter Guzil. Composite photo, 9/11 12
Blade runner scene: the scene presents a radically new understanding of the photographic image as a three-dimensional "virtual" space. The referent to the virtual picture taken by the computer is a data set, not a fragment of the real The computer can see in a way profoundly liberated from the optical, perspectival, and temporal conditions of human vision What we confront here is a multiply distorted technical mediation that requires the abandoning of any particular perspectival anchoring for its "resolution." BLADE RUNNER 13