(Entertainment) News

During our conversation last class while we were talking about the issues of gossip news and tabloid sensationalism, I was reminded of the following clip from MSNBC... it's of a news show where the anchor, Mika Brzezinski, refuses to read the lead story regarding Paris Hilton being released from jail. She gets pretty melodramatic about it, and in the beginning of the clip, we see this as a cooperative effort between her and her co-anchors; what frustrates me (and this is sort of off the topic) is that by the end of the clip, her co-anchors are really ribbing her for sticking to this value-statement she's trying to make (one which they egged her on about in the beginning, no less). In any case, however, it's an interesting look into a few things -- first, how the production of "news" occurs in various stages (tv news producers who create the news segment versus television news anchors who present it) and that those who participate in the various stages are not always in agreement with each other, and second, how news really has changed to the point where a story about a celebrity (who is famous for simply being famous) trumps stories regarding politics and, I think, the presidential election.

My thoughts on Image Politics

I found Deluca's Image Politics rather interesting not because of the subject matter, but the approach the author took in discussing the topic.  I couldn't help but feel that Deluca was trying to make us side with the protesters by omitting a lot of the facts.  Much like Jaya's post regarding the Vietnam picture, it appears that people are drawing general conclusions from images that don't fully represent the situation.  Although the author shows us pictures and provides example of the activists/protesters getting injured, threatened, etc., we never fully understand what the protesters are doing to receive this treatment. 

While reading this article, I kept thinking of the Westboro Baptist Church group from Kansas.  For those of you unfamiliar with them, they are an anti-gay hate group (their website is www.godhatesfags.com) who have made a name for themselves the past few years by traveling around the country and protesting at the funerals of soldiers killed in the Middle East.  Despite the fact that they are claiming to spread God's message, they exploit very rough times for their fellow citizens by turning a day or remorse into a day of hate.  The following link has an example of their antics: 

www.salem-news.com/articles/june272006/Tucker_Funeral_Protest_62706.php

In this example, you would be hard pressed to find someone who would not want to cause harm to this particular group.  In fact, this has become such an issue, that a group called the Patriot Riders has come along to make these funerals peaceful. These riders are former war vets that follow the church group all around the US and make sure that they do not disrupt the funerals.  You can check them out on their website: www.patriotguard.org. 

I know that this week's topic is Pictures and Publics, but I can't help but feel that Deluca was trying to prove a point by omitting a lot of the facts. Maybe I am completely wrong, maybe I didn't read the article close enough, but I cannot help but feel that in order to receive the treatment that some of these protesters did, there has to more to the story. 

Take the example I cited above.  If all you saw of this was a biker taking on a protester, you would feel for the protester.  Then again, how would your opinion change if you knew that person was protesting at your son's, brother's, or even dad's funeral, calling his death God's punishment for our country's acceptance of gays. 

Just some things to think about...hopefully...

Really a response to the posts on anamorphosis...

...but I couldn't figure out how to insert an image into a comment, so I just created a new post.

Another example that I thought of while reading about Holbein's anamorphosis was Salvador Dali... many of his paintings, being surrealist, include these same sort of distortions that are not equally visible (comprehensible?) from every perspective. One of my favorite examples of this is in \The Hallucinogenic Toreador\. What, from one angle, looks like a line of women's half-clothed bodies appears, from another angle, to be the bottoms of men's faces (presumably the toreadors) and the necks of their shirts. Not only does this fascinate me from a production standpoint (I am no artist, and I have no idea how one goes about painting one thing, much less one thing that could be another from a different angle), but I also find it interesting in that many of Dali's paintings also include religious imagery (such as Jesus' face in the top lefthand corner of this painting). It again harks back to the Latour article and the relationship between the first and the second regimes. Perhaps in this case, this distortion could be seen as alluding to the possibility of multiple readings but the impossibility of ever reading them in both ways simultaneously.

Music as Representation? a couple of random thoughts

Mitchell says "Many of these theories take music, (which for obvious reasons, is hard to describe in representational terms) as the paradigm for all the arts" (p. 17) and Hall says "Even music is a 'language" with complex relations between different sounds and chords, though it is a very special case since it can't easily be used to reference actual things or objects in the world" (p. 19) raises a couple of thoughts...as far as sounds go, in the movie Blow Out with John Travolta, where he is a sound guy for movies, he is ultimately after the perfect sounding "scream," and ends up using sadly his girlfriend, who gets murdered....yes her scream is authentic but is it because it was his girlfriend? what is being represented here?

and what about the many generations that appear at concerts - van halen, bruce springsteen...and the cultures that intermingle with that parents bringing kids...what are the parents saying that the music represents to them?

Natural Events as representative of ...something?

I am struck by the ability of representations to capture concepts that may not necessarily have direct physical existences. Concepts like purity, corruption, good, evil, and other things referred to as ideas do not have direct correlates in physical world. Language is tricky like that, and although the Inuit may have many, many words for types of snow, each of those words is a slicing up of reality in a specific way (as Burke would say, it is an application of terministic screens). Hall relates this to a clustering of meanings. He writes "We have called this a 'system of representation.' That is because it consists, not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them" (p. 17). The above photograph ties to this concept pretty well, in that is represents (stands in for) the Greek legendary figures of the three fates. However, the three fates are conceptual, as far as we know, there were never three females, one a maiden, one a mother, and one a crone, who weaved the lives of heroes and average people, ending their lives by cutting the life thread.
Representation, it seems, has a difficult side as well. Take for instance, the very geeky reference I am about to make. In the online video game World of Warcraft, a virtual plague was accidentally spread throughout the virtual world, decimating entire imaginary cities and emptying villages. This random event has caught the attention of some epidemiologists who want to explore what this means for actual spreading of real diseases. These individuals want to use online games as a an example of what would happen in the real world should a large-scale plague actually occur. However, interpreting random events as representations of something strikes me as dangerous--it opens up all kinds of epistemological issues, at the very least. Through the representative powers of language, we can conceptually lay claim to the invisible and possibly non-existent (by that I mean those things that possibly exist only in our minds and at the level of language and symbol) but I would like to wager that more problems are created when we make realist connections between the objects-in-the-world with the concepts-in-our-head. Of course, there are those who argue that these concepts are ontological in nature (Kenneth Burke is one of them, and he made a career out of exploring the rhetorical qualities of language as ontological).

Article referencing the online plague for those interested.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11330

Holbein's anamorphosis

After reading about Holbein's anamorphosis, I began to wonder if this concept of anamorphosis can be applied to other types of photos. One such design I came up with was the use of photo collages to product larger images. Such is found at the right with a collage of John Ashcroft (why John? Because this was the best example I could find online). Quite obviously, this photo will create a different effect depending upon where on stands. If they are close to the image, they will see the individual smaller pictures whereas viewing it from a distance will portray Mr. Ashcroft. 

How does this compare to Hoblein's The Ambassadors and can we possibly compare the two for their distorted features? I honestly don't know the answer but I thought it would be worth the discussion.

Hi, all. Like my first blog entry should be about an article I read for a different class, but there you go. At least I’m making connections… ?

In Strat Comm, our readings for the coming week are on issues of collective memory. One article we read in particular is titled “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’” by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2003). The authors look at a specific image from the coverage of the Vietnam War (“Accidental Napalm Attack,” 1972) and how it functioned and continues to function. I thought this was interesting particularly for this class, as this sort of image analysis really gives shape to some of the theory we’ve been reading. Hariman and Lucaites take these theories as their framework to examine the concept of collective memory as it is shaped by visual communication – how images work to construct collectivity.

To discuss the rhetoric of images, Hariman and Lucaites look at this image in particular. They take into account both the composition of the image and the context surrounding it to flesh out a fuller understanding of the different readings the image can provide. Specifically, the discussion is of how images become iconic, or when/how they gain the capacity to constitute a public out of a group of strangers via identification with some element of the image.

They also look at the production of images, particularly in terms of how images can be manipulated – the examples within the article are two specific intentional manipulations of this image and how they convey their own messages as extensions of the original. This example is an artist’s (Jeffrey Decoster’s) rendering of this photograph; the manipulations, however, were made with the intention of expanding on the messages within the photograph and of creating entirely new messages. The placement of the little girl in a bathing suit and on a suburban lawn, the addition of the ghostly-transparent veteran in a wheelchair next to her, and the composition of the elements to create a triangle (with the ball on the lawn) to drawn in the viewer all work to create a more insistent call to moral action in regards to the Vietnam War.

While the specifics are extremely interesting (and disturbing), the set-up of the framework for this discussion was what caught my eye in terms of this class. In the beginning of the article, the authors tackle some of the issues we’ve been discussing, specifically those from the week we spent on Semiology. They discuss the differences between visual media and discursive media – a question from the first class which we have yet to return to – and the suspicions of how visual media can function relative to discursive media. This leads into a brief discussion of the concept that all media is mixed media, that there is never any purely visual media. This reminded me of Barthes and his caveat for denotive messages; he says essentially the same thing when he posits that theoretically there can be a purely denotive message but that it is virtually impossible to ever encounter that message because of the cultural knowledge and perception we bring to the image.

Obviously, because the focus of the article is a photograph, the authors then go into a lengthier discussion of the pitfalls of reading photographs as texts – all of which are reminiscent of our readings from the week on Semiology. The authors talk explicitly about Barthes and Eco, specifically in terms of an acknowledgment of the “representational autonomy” of photographs – what Barthes discusses, when he mentions how photographs retain some elements of their object and thus can be confused as neutral representations. The discussion in this article, however, really leans more towards Hall’s conception of what goes on with photograph – the subtle difference of the degree, rather than the presence or absence, of ideology in a photographic image. For these authors, as for Hall, photos appear to be value-neutral representations of their object but always convey some value system; this appearance works to relay naturalizing concepts of ideology that aren’t natural at all.

This is a long and complicated dissection of a very complex image; because of that, and because not everyone else has read the article, I realize that this is probably a poor example for discussion. That said, I thought it was a really interesting – and helpful – application of the theoretical perspectives we’ve been discussing so far.

Hariman, R. & Lucaites, J.L. (2003). Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of "Accidental Napalm". Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20(1 - Mar 2003), 35-66.