Unger to Leave Minister's Post
Labels: Roberto Unger
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Roberto Unger
"Different Trains began because of my childhood four-day train trips across America between my divorced parents. There was also the American tradition of train songs: 'John Henry', 'Night Train', 'Soul Train', 'Chattanooga Choo Choo'. I got recordings of American and European trains. Then I started making recordings of my childhood nanny, Virginia, who accompanied me, and Mr Davis, a retired Pullman Porter from that era. I then realised these were the same years that Hitler was taking over Europe and killing every Jew he could find. So I went to sound archives of holocaust survivors speaking about what happened to them – and the trains they rode. Then I set myself a rule: don't change the pitch of the voices by using a computer. This was an homage from the living to the dead and I had to preserve the integrity of all the voices. So every time there is a new speaker, there is a different tempo and a different key. And that constraint forced me into coming up with a completely different musical work, one that both looked back to my earliest work with speech tape-loops, and forward to what I would do in the future with video artist Beryl Korot. If someone had suggested that I write 'a piece about the Holocaust' I'd have said 'absolutely no' – it's too enormous to presume to deal with. But, just as I was using the actual voices of my nanny and the Pullman Porter talking about their lives, I could use the actual voices of Holocaust survivors talking about their lives as well. This created a piece where the documentary reality and the musical reality become one and the same. And if it works – and I believe it does – that's why." ~ Steve Reich__________
Labels: Music, Steve Reich
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: democracy, Dewey, Pragmatism, spaces
"You won't often hear me call a photographer a genius. I think there's too much homage paid to an art that's basically just holding up a piece of machinery and pushing a button.But notice that, having denied the appellation"genius" to anyone engaged in so mechanical a process as "pushing a button," he then more or less immediately takes it back. The alternative would be to appear just plain silly and, of course, to deprive himself of a subject - namely Tillim. The problem is not with photography but with the art world and those who inhabit it as, regardless of medium, tends to push the mediocre work of "artists" in the cause of making a buck.
There are great photographs and great photographers. But far too much fuss is made now of average photographs by average artists. It's not so much a cult of the camera as of the run-of-the-mill."
"Tillim is a South African photographer whose work is at once a report on contemporary Africa and an artistic image of it. His pictures deliver the shock of classic photojournalism as he traverses the continent, visiting crisis zones such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or, on his home ground, downtown Jo'burg. But they are at the same time chosen and composed images. Tillim photographs Africa in a way that communicates ambivalent and disturbing ideas and perceptions; every one of his pictures is at the same time a record of something seen and something he seems to have thought about for a long time.The most obvious problem in this discussion, I think, is that it is cast in dichotomous terms ~ optimism or pessimism. I don't think this dichotomy captures Tillim's work. Nor does it capture the work of other terrific African photographers such as David Goldblatt, Andrew Esiebo, Phillip Cartland, Santu Mofokeng or others whom I've commented on here in the past. Nor does it capture the work of non-African photographers who have depicted the continent ~ James Nachtwey, Robert Lyons, Sebastiao Slagado, Ron Haviv and so on. Even when such photographers depict tragedy, violence, deprivation, and chaos, they hardly do so because they think such conditions are irremediable. If they did they would be either wasting their time, or playing the role of voyeur in which critics like Sontag notoriously cast them. If the latter interpretation (or some variation on it) were not so common, it would be too obviously shallow to merit a response.
Tillim is a provocative artist. At a time when art museums in the rich world often seem to want to create a fictionalised modern Africa – as if by celebrating something that does not exist it can be brought into being – he portrays a continent in chaos. His portraits of child soldiers are particularly scary. In his recent body of work, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, he documents buildings whose modernist idealism dates from the early years of African independence. Today these buildings are in various states of decay and transformation. It is not an optimistic series.
But I don't think Tillim is a dubious gloater over misery and poverty. He is a truth-teller. And it's in telling the truth - directly or indirectly, prosaically or poetically - that photography discovers its artistic power."
Labels: Africa, Conventions, David Goldblatt, Tillim
Labels: Afghanistan, Kodak, Technology
Labels: blogs
By all accounts the political situation in Iran has become increasingly dire. At The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has posted a statement that "defeated" reform candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi issued yesterday. From the perspective of Western liberals (to say nothing of progressives) it is complicated. Having said that there is no reason to remain silent in the face of government repression in Iran.
Political theorist Ramin Jahanbegloo has had his share of confrontational interactions with the theocrats in Iran [1] [2] [3]. You can view an interview with him regarding the Iranian election and subsequent events at ResetDOC. Here is a statement for which Jahanbegloo is soliciting support (it is being circulated by various folks here in the U.S.):
"Dear friends and colleagues,
Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian-Canadian intellectual, has sent us this statement, asking us to solicit the signatures of our editors and writers. Both of us have signed it and urge you to do so. We plan on posting the letter and the names of signatories on our website, and Ramin also plans to send the statement to the New York Times and various other news sources.
If you would like to be added to the list of signatories, please respond to this email or email David Marcus at marcus@dissentmagazine.org
-Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin
You can find insightful analyses on the general situation in Iran at Dissent, openDemocracy, and MERIP Online. Of course, events are quickly outrunning these general assessments.We, the undersigned scholars, academics and writers around the world, are concerned about the human rights crisis in Iran. We request the United Nations to condemn the current coup d’état and support Iranians in their demand for a fair and democratic election. Deeply worried by the reports of Iranian paramilitary groups and security forces firing upon and arresting peaceful civilian demonstrators, we demand that the international community act now to prevent further violence and bloodshed. We call on the government of Iran to respect and uphold the right to peaceful protest. We call upon democratic institutions and organizations around the world to condemn government-sponsored violence against peaceful Iranian protestors. We also call on governments around the world to ask the UN Secretary General, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Human Rights Council to appoint a UN special commission to monitor the post-election situation in Iran and to inform the Security Council about the arbitrary arrest and detention of student activists and leading reformists in Iran."
Labels: Iran
“Global Forced LaborThe efforts and intentions of the people involved in this project seem admirable and in some ways (e.g., the incorporation of text and voices and music) innovative.* But the undertaking does prompt deep skepticism in me. Here are a set of what seem to me to be pretty obvious questions:
The Statistics
949,000 in Asia Pacific
1,320,000 in Latin America and the Caribbean
660,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa
260,000 in Middle East and North Africa
210,000 in transitional countries
360,000 in industrialized countries
12,300,000 in all
Almost half of them children
International Labour Organization, 2005
The Stories
Mark Kwadwo is 5 years old.
He was sold to a fisherman in Kete Krachi, Ghana.
Instead of having a childhood, he works each day scooping water from a leaky boat while he is hungry and scared.
Mark cannot swim.
New York Times, 10.29.06
One story can change the world.
AT WHAT COST ~ Human Trafficking/Forced Labor/Child Labor will be a traveling, outdoor exhibition designed to bring public, official, and mainstream media attention to the global crisis of human trafficking and labor abuse towards children and adults. In focusing on the tragically commonplace occurrence of abusive practices in the production of goods and the provision of services by international workers of all ages and ethnicities, the exhibition will present the portraits and stories of ten individuals who have experienced these atrocities.
The project, told in photographs and recorded voices, will focus on the individual experiences of ten people who have been forced to work under abusive conditions in such industries as agriculture, mining, seafood production, domestic service, sexual services, and textile fabrication. Individuals will share not only their images but their stories, which listeners can both read and hear as they connect with the portraits before them. By focusing on the individual story, rather than statistics about these abuses, viewers will be able to identify with those impacted and are more likely to follow through with their own personal support towards abolishing such practices.
Launching in 2010 with a tour of international academic centers the exhibition team will work with venues to create rich programming around each of the issues explored.
In the instance of Mark Kwadwo an individual story in a newspaper prompted a woman thousands of miles away to provide the funding to rescue him from slavery. At a larger scale these stories can allow us, as a society, to abolish slavery.”
Labels: Human Rights, Human Trafficking, political economy, Political Not Ethical, portraits
Labels: Media Politics, political economy
"Yesterday some blogs circulated a note about the fact that of the 24 judges of the 2009 PDN Photo Annual contest, all of them are white. It's a valid point, and one that everyone who works on PDN’s contests has given a lot of thought. While the lack of any judges of color wasn’t intentional, it is regrettable. Thanks to the huge number of entries it draws from around the world, the Photo Annual offers us our best opportunity to see a wide range of work from different perspectives. We should make sure our judges represent a wide range of perspectives as well."Not bad, huh? Actually, no; this is pretty lame. First, of course, Stan Banos had raised the issue with PDN way before "yesterday." So this generally glacial response conveys a certain, shall we say, lack of enthusiasm for dealing with a pretty amazingly bad judgement.
"I failed to consider how an all white panel of judges might effect the perception of, to say nothing of the outcomes to, our contests. This oversight is a departure from our past practice. Since I recognize that theses choices have impact on the lives and careers of individuals and on the fortunes of organizations, I regret this failure. In the future I plan to do X, Y, Z to insure that our panels are not simply composed of accomplished individuals but are diverse as well. That will include making sure that there is a specific person on staff here at PDN whose job it is to scrutinize our internal practices."Unfortunately the remainder of the statement is even less confidence inspiring.
"Past judges of PDN photo contests have included African-Americans, Latinos and Asians who work as photo editors, art directors, web designers and educators. We didn’t choose them out of tokenism. (Yesterday when we were reading the blog comments about this issue, PDN Custom Media Project Manager John Gimenez, who works with the judges during the judging process, noted that he usually doesn’t know the race of the judges until they send him their head shots, and by then the judging is done.) We don’t like to put the same judges through this grueling task too often, and the lack of diversity in the photo community as a whole means that it requires effort to compose a diverse panel year after year. But it is an effort that’s worth making. "First, I will take the PDN folks at their word. It is great that past panels have been more diverse than the monochromatic one they put together this year. And it is great too (if we can judge by Mr. Gimenez's surname) that they even have something of an ethnically diverse staff. Your subtlety has not been lost Ms. Highes. But, I read this paragraph as an admission that any past diversity was more or less accidental. Even Mr. Gimenez didn't know the composition of the panel he was working with until he saw their head shots! Well, that is wholly beside the point, really. Is Mr. Gimenez responsible in any way for selecting the panels or for identifying in advance rosters of individuals who might be solicited to serve as a judge? If the profession is so bereft of accomplished men and women of color, one would think that whomever put the panels together would have been taking great care to try to insure a diverse group of judges. There is no indication that that has been the case. I have no confidence, based on this statement from PDN that anything will actually change. Do you?
Labels: Celebrity, Fashion Photography
Labels: Berger, John Berger, Palestine
Labels: climate change, environmentalism, Global Warming, Landscape
Labels: Hot Blues for the Homeless, Local Event, Music
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: Katha Pollitt
Labels: David Campbell, HIV
Schedule: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.
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
Labels: Conferences
The blind subject is the objective corollary of the photographer's longed-for invisibility. It comes as no surprise therefore - the logic of the medium seems almost to demand it - that so many photographers have made pictures of the blind (13).One of the first posts I made here took up this claim that photographers aspire - in fact or in the ideal - to be invisible. I continue to think the claim is mistaken. Indeed, I am not sure how it could be credible. For all that, Dyer's book is really smart. And Cruz's work continues many of the themes he raises.