The Digital Age

The digital age, according to Fred Ritchin, has killed photography's aura, it's physicality. Photography has expanded.  Comparing the automobile to the digital age in this opening chapter, we can assume Ritchin believes that digital photography has given us more control, more power, more autonomy, more information, and a sense of entitlement.

Digital photography has also "banished the actual experience and flattened it into a small rectangle, preferring its commodification as a picture show. It is not because it makes it more immediately 'real' that we prefer the image, but because it makes it more unreal, an unreality in which we hope to find a transcendent immortality, a higher, less finite, reality."

According to Ritchin, the digital age has created "continuous partial attention," everyone is producing and consuming images all the time. Our world has become photographic: we see and experience the world through a screen. We literally interact with each other through a screen, i.e. Facebook and text messages, continuously being in actual reality and at the same time being in the non-reality of the screen and images. We also are more concerned with experiencing life through a screen, for example, we go to art museums and instead of experiencing the art object, we photograph it. At concerts, no one is experiencing the live music being performed in front of them, instead cell phones and cameras are held up to their faces in order to immortalize and "remember" the event. No one is watching the event, or looking at the object, instead they are looking at a tiny cell phone screen and making sure they are holding the camera steady.

We are constantly ready for our next photo opportunity, the potential image. Nothing just is, everything is now thought of in terms of photographs, everything is staged, nothing is real. At social events, people are more interested in documenting their presence and staging their photographs than actual social interactions, so that their recorded  and staged social interactions can be seen on social media. How constructed and fake and non-real.

Privacy is diminished, with the digital age images last an eternity, there is no decay or sense of time or space, everything is flattened and on the surface. Digital photography can be thought of as surfacism, as Krista Thompson would say.

Finally, Ritchin believes images are replacing reality.

Are they? I think the digital age of photography has put an emphasis on the surface of reality, not the actual visceral experience, but on what can be recorded and immortalized for the world to see. Digital is about appearances, perfection, and consumerism as we can see from the women and men on magazine covers who are an idealized and perfected version of reality. Then there is Facebook, where users can construct their virtual identity, and show not who they are in reality, but who they want to be perceived as, though this idea is not different from pre-digital, it is just expanded and extreme and surfacist.


When I first think of this non-reality, the potential image, constant pose, and diminished privacy, I think of Evan Baden's work Technically Intimate.

 This image in particular is an exemplary example because the sign in the window says "Life is not about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself" with the focus on "creating yourself"and the images on the wall are gridded in the style of the Facebook photo album.

Tangent:

This sexuality is performed, created, published, constructed. The images the masses have seen from the porn industry have influenced and constructed what sexuality is, what it looks like, what it can be. These images are representative of how images and media are consumed and produced and influencing each other. Porn, a now digital visual media, expanded along with digital photography and created a billion dollar industry. I think the digital age is the golden age for porn, in the sense that it has never been more prosperous. How interesting.

Not that any of this is a new idea, it has just proliferated through the digital era.



 Jorge Ribalta's "Molecular Documents" starts out comparing digital photography to the onset of globalism and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. With the death of the physical and chemical analog photography, image makers must reconsider their relationship to their materials. Gone are the days of printing c-prints, there is only one paper left. Processes are dying out, and Ribalta correctly predicts that "new capitalist economies" will provide traditional photography supplies. Polaroid is being revived and Fujiroid came out in response to the end of Polaroid.

Ribalta's central argument is against the notion that photography is dead: "Paradoxically, photography's death is simultaneously its diffuse explosion into culture, its most definitive triumph."Amateurs no longer have to worry about chemicals, processes, editing, printing, viewing. The cost is down, the limits are nonexistent, and everything is autonomous with digital photography, everyone can take pictures now, without having to know anything technical about the medium. Digital photography democratized the medium.

Death of photography, meaning the chemical process, and the birth of the photographic, meaning the new digital age. With the ease of the creating things that never existed, digital photography loses its indexicality. And with photography's history being seeped in a tradition of documenting the real problems of the real world, if photo loses its historical mission of document (realism) as means of social transformation (an Ariella Azoulay idea), it is dead. Literally dead because photography without realism is irrelevant in our culture.

So, how do we maintain social relevance in the age of digital photography? We create a new style of documentary, somewhere between indexical and fake. Staged or, as Fried would say, near documentary. According to Ribalta and Jacques Ranciere, "fiction is the condition for the real to be thought." And in the case of Kahn and Selesnick, Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Loretta Lux, Matt Siber, Lori Nix, Ben Gest, and Vincent Debanne, this is true.

Ribalta uses Jo Spence as a "strong demonstration that the self-experimentation, self-education, and self learning involved in true artistic play cannot be frozen into art commodities but must constantly resist the reified condition of the art object in the bourgeois public sphere." Or, more simply, Jo Spence questioned what are is and where it should be displayed, and that we should also critique the art institutions. Alternative spaces, like the ones at MDW fair last weekend and the apartment galleries, web galleries, blogs, streets, and all other alt spaces have been an action of the contemporary, digital era. Until now, museums and galleries were the only ways art could be seen and bought. Now there are global art fairs, biennials, and all the spaces I just named. Institutional critiques must continue so we can "transc[ed} art's 'cultural confinement'."We must continue to create our own ways of showing, buying, and creating art.

Ribalta believes we need to reinvent realism, to be in between documentary and fiction, since our world is now in between the real and tangible and the abstract and intangible.

Alt spaces fair for Chicago spaces

Loretta Lux

Ben Gest, imitating painting through multiple images and digital compositing

Gregory Crewdson, creating stories through digital manipulation and compositing

Lori Nix creates her own post apocalyptic worlds through dioramas and digital means

Kelli Connell, Double Life

Jeff Wall, near documentary

Kahn and Selesnick create fictional stories through digital manipulation

Kerry Skarbakka

Kerry Skarbakka, the image that was posted on FailBlog.com and actually believed

Vincent Debanne

Vincent Debanne compsited Metro Map gazers and other environments to create this series

Matt Siber

Matt Siber

Corey Dzenko's "Analog to Digital" claims that digital accelerated and enlarged photographic processes. Though theoretically, digital should lose it's indexicality, viewers still believe digital images and take them at face value.


Because of the photography's physical and chemical connection to reality, it has been used as a visual recorder and historically indexical. From the physical to the digital, the object is abstracted and turned into data. This lack of physical connection to the real world presents a theoretical challenge to the indexicality of photography, especially in since Photoshop makes it easy to create realities and objects and people that do not exist. We, as image consumers, should know all this and mistrust the indexicality and realism of photography, right?


Wrong. Viewers still believe the images they see, whether they are online or in a newspaper. Digital photography has not changed the indexical nature of photography. This is the social function of digital photography, that viewers believe images, always.



Digital has certainly made my life easier as a photographer, but the past year I've missed the physical connection to making art, using my hands. There is a visceral feeling about making things with your hands and the physicality of it that digital can never mimic. Digital is an abstraction, and it feels that way, it feels non-real. I think a lot of photographers are feeling this way and that's why we see people like Elizabeth Ernst painting over her photographs of her sculptures, or Matt Siber starting to build sculptures, or the proliferation of photograms and alternative processes. It's reactionary against digital photography. Also, art schools are beginning to desegregate photography from other arts, becoming more interdisciplinary,  which I think is reactionary against digital photography in the sense that art curriculum gets back to hand made things with a presence and an aura, but at the same time, without digital, photo might have been segregated indefinitely from other forms of art.

Roni Horn You Are the Weather

Shine

Watch The Throne by Kanye West and Jay Z, album artwork/creative direction by Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy

The Theoretical Status of The Concept of Race by Howard Winant

Main Points:

Race as an Ideological Construct: the theory the idea of race came about after slavery in order to keep those in power in power, and that it took on a life of its own and turned an illusion into reality.

Reasons why this theory is lacking:
1. It can only explain the origins of race thinking
2. Does not explain how race thinking evolved from these origins
3. Logically, race cannot take on a life of it's own because it is an illusion, pure ideology
4. Cannot train ourselves to be colorblind
5. Fails to recognize race has become a principal of social organizing and identity formation after the diffusion and enforcement of race thinking over five hundred years
6. Fails to recognize that at the level of experience of everyday life race is an impermeable part of our identities. To be without race is akin to being without identity.


Race as an Objective Condition: the theory that "sociopolitical circumstances change over historical time, racially defined groups adapt or fail to adapt to these changes, achieving mobility or remaining mired in poverty"and "one simply is one's race"

Reasons why this theory is lacking:
1. In this theory there is no reconceptualization of group identities
2. The groups roles are assigned and performed
3. Not everyone can fit into the box American race thinking (black, white, yellow, red, brown)
4. There is no account of the performative aspect of race "act black" or "act white"
5. Cannot grasp the processual and relational character of racial identity and meaning
6. Denies the social and historical comprehensiveness of the race concept
7. Cannot account for individual and collective actors have to manage incoherent and conflictual racial meanings and identities every day

Racial Formation:

A) Contemporary political relationships:

1.       Race is forever being reconstituted in the present because counterhegemonic and postcolonial power is attained and the meanings and political articulations of race proliferate. (South African Apartheid for example)
2.      Competing racial projects, or efforts to institutionalize racial meanings and identities. 
3.      The denial of race perpetuates the importance of race (by denying there is a problem or saying it is invisible, or making it invisible, the problem continues. Much like Azoulay's theory of rape as an invisible crime).
4.      The complex nature of new racial identities
5.      Political culture is beyond the edges of imperial boundaries, colonialism and postcolonialism are long gone

B) The global context of race:

1. Racial space is becoming globalized because it is no longer in terms of imperial reach, colonization, or conquest.
2. The distinction between developed and underdeveloped has been overcome in the sense that those that were previously "immigrants" challenge the status of those in power.
3. Rise of diasporic models of blackness and the creation of panethnic communities (latino/a vs. mexican, puerto rican, chilean). 
4. Breaking down of borders in Europe (European Union) and North America is internationalizing and racializing previously national identities.
5. To recognized the "panethnic" phenomena and it's construction of new racial identities is to recognize the global extent of racial hegemony.
6. Racelessness once meant dominance, if you didn't think about your race, you were in power. Now, people are starting to feel anxiety about their "whiteness" meaning that racial identity is becoming globalized.

C) The emergence of racial time

1. The overdetermined construction of the world civilization as a product of the rise of Europe and the subjugation of the rest of us still defines the race concept.
2. Race was seen as a natural condition, then as an illusion, and now we are nearing the end of that theory too.

A hopeful conclusion for the possible future of the concept of race is that it neither signifies a comprehensive identity nor fundamental difference, but instead works as a marker of the infinity of variations we humans hold as common heritage and hope for the future.

The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop

First off, I loved this paper. She is a great writer and such an interesting subject matter and fascinating conclusions are drawn.


Important main points:

1. The importance of being seen being seen.
2. Hip-hop's concept of bling parallels Baroque, Dutch, and Renaissance paintings and the importance of the surface.
3. Bling refers to a visual language that is so "loud" that it breaks the barriers of vision and becomes sonic, or audible. (To keep going with the thought of breaking through one sense, hip-hop's bass breaks the barriers of audible spectrum and is literally felt)
4. Members of the African diaspora often, due to being invisible in society, resorted to sound in order to be heard (importance of music in hip-hop culture)
5. The effect of sheen or shine was to point out the materiality of objects and highlight them as commodities. In the painting styles referred in this paper, the wealth of the subjects were accentuated in their sheen, both in actuality and on the canvas, where as the skin of the subjects was the only part of the painting that did not have sheen. Shine of black skin was used in slave trade to cover the humanity of slaves and heighten their value as commodities. This is important as it relates to the use of shine on black women's bodies in hip-hop music videos and the idea of shine and blackness as objectification.
6. History of hip-hop: started as subcultural movement in the Bronx in the late 1970's. For related yet different types of expression: deejaying, emceeing, break dancing, and writing/graffiti. Though marketed as an "African American" genre, it was actually a product forged within and between the African diasporic communities (Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Latino). "Golden era" of hip-hop used music to creatively and critically respond to the poor conditions of black and Latino communities. Then we moved into the era of MTV in the 1980's and hip-hop achieved commercial and global success. There was a shift from political messages in hip-hop to lavishing in pleasure and capitalism. Due to hip-hops commercial and global success, it's visual culture was produced, promoted, and propagated everywhere. Thompson relates this to the Hans Holbein painting, where both groups, Dutch and hip-hop cultures, enjoyed success and relished in it by making their success visible.
7. Corporate America's visual culture and the height of the MTV era pushed and celebrated capitalistic hip-hop globally.
8. More on bling: bling attracts attention, a to-be-seeness, but is so bright that it blinds the viewer. Bling is a state between hypervisibility and blinding invisibility. Bling=status, power.
9. Surfacism historically goes against, or gives an alternate perspective to, the normative forms of representation. (Dutch painting's quality of light vs. Cartesian perspectivalism, hip-hop visual culture vs. all other genre's visual culture).
10. Kehinde Wiley is a genius.
11. Wiley ideas: Power as performance, visual propagation of power, act of being represented=power (having portrait painted in 16th century meant you had power, paparazzi prom goers are being represented), importance of light and the quality of light (limelight, lineup light), blinding light to reveal modes of black subjectivity concealed and rendered invisible by bling's shine, hypermasculinization and hypersexualization and questioning that in his paintings (sitters taking on feminine names, poses), ephemerality of all that shines (ice sculpture).
12. Material value of light itself
13. Global commodification of black culture
14. Gispert's focus on the illusion of gravity. Gispert questions illusions of gravity and how they are used to show the super-humaness of black athletes (Michael Jordan and Nike, Air Jordans) and how it's used to market black youth culture in advertising. Black body as a commodity in this practice. Gispert's figures are unable to transcend earthly gravity, weighed down by jewelry.
15. Cruising to see and be seen being seen.
16. The shiny surface, independent of the object, has become central to the value of things
17. Visual expression exceeds the optical realm
18. Blackness, and bling, as a commodity in visual culture historically and contemporarily.


Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom? by Holland Cotter

Main points:

1. Multiculturalism wanted to bring diversity to the art-world, but instead ghettoized it.
2. Postethnicity, where artists don't just think about race, but race is viable content as it has to do with one's identity. Art world must change too.
3. Hope for future: to be beyond labels.

Photo Review: Camera as Accomplices, Helping Race Divide America Against Itself by Holland Cotter

Main Points:
1. "Race is a social concept... that permits a certain group of people to control other groups by establishing heirarchal ranking and sustaining that ranking through physical and psychological force"
2. Photography helped record and reinforce racial hierarchies.

The Thong Song by Sisqo = the epitome of what Krista Thompson discussed. Winner of the MTV Music Video award for Best Hip-Hop video. Antigravity, shiny objects, cars and to-be-seeness, Sisqo's hair is actually silver, the women are objectified, overly sexualized and are wearing oil that makes their bodies shine.


Just something I don't understand: Horrorcore rap: Monster, OFWGKTA. Here are criticisms of Tyler the Creator as redefining blaxplotation. Here is another take of the same video. Reasons for not understanding it: why would women want to get down to this? It's about rape and violence against women, it's degrading.

Here is a section of the Times relating to how race is being redefined.

Here is an interview with Harry Belafonte, a man who's racial identity did not fit into the stereotyped box and he achieved great success.

I thought this was interesting, as it relates to the rise of MTV and teens. Teens income is 100% disposable in suburban America, and it's interesting, MTV's corporate propagation of hip-hop and youth culture and brands like Nike and Juicy Couture's fame through hip-hop and youth.



The Roots making fun of hip-hop music video stereotypes

Notorious B.I.G.

Notorious BIG, Puff Daddy, MJ Blige. All big names in hip-hop at the time. Sean Combs (aka Puff Daddy, P. Diddy) is famous for his consumerism and bling (Black and White party comes to mind).  Biggest names in hip-hop fought against each other, BIG and Tupac died in these wars.  Themes that appear in this video: money, consumerism, women as objects, being seen being seen (at the end the we watch the crowd watch them).

Jay Z and Kanye, big names in hip-hop today, collaborate instead of being at war with each other. Both are still surfacists.

Watch the Throne is explicitly about consumerism. Kanye went to Occupy Wall Street recently, which is interesting seeing that this album raps about spending $50,000 being no big deal. Themes in this video: brand names, capitalism, materialism, youth, to-be-seeness.

Ludacris, a southern hip-hop artist. Themes in this video: seen being seen, objectification of women, cars, brands, consumerism, sex, pleasure.

Anything But What You Were Ha by Carrie Mae Weems

Notes on the Margin of Black Book by Glenn Ligon

I saw Glenn Ligon's mid-career retrospective titled Glenn Ligon: America at the Whitney Museum in March and spent the most time with this piece. Ligon took Mapplethorpe's Black Book and showed it to black men and black gay men and asked them what they thought about the work. I added Carrie Mae Weem's appropriated image from Mapplethorpe's Black Book and put it with this because both are commenting on the exploitation, objectification, and sexualization of blackness through the appropriation of the same body of work.

The Pain of Others

Photojournalists are really stingy with copyright, so here's an image from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but the photos I wanted to show are linked below.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/10/09/world/middleeast/20101010-EGYPT-3.html




http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/africa/2011-oct-libya-slide-show.html#7


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/africa/2011-oct-libya-slide-show.html#40


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/africa/2011-june-libya-slide-show-.html#76




http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/tyler-hicks-a-decade-in-afghanistan/




I always avoided looking at war/conflict photography because before the Arab Spring, the photos were always from Iraq or Afganistan and I just didn't care. In fact, I have not "watched" or carefully looked at a conflict photograph in all my college years. After reading excerpts from The Civil Contract of Photography by Ariella Azoulay and Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, I decided to look at the horrors that we are supposedly bombarded with.

1. I'm arguing that we are not bombarded. Yes, there's a plethora of images out there, but as I have just demonstrated, many viewers simply choose not to look. The beauty of the internet, you can be as selective as you want. I get my news from the New York Times website daily, but my mouse never hovers over a conflict article, and even if it does, the images that we should see aren't posted with the article, instead they are filed away somewhere on a separate space from the Times site ( I had to actively search for these images rather than being passively bombarded). I have posted links to images that I found extremely painful to look at, and one even moved me to tears.

2. The pictures in my head of the conflict in Afganistan and Lybia were far from what I saw in the photographs, and the photographs made it more real to me. (Agreeing with Azoulay on this point)

3. Photographer: there to show injustice. Subject: knows why photographer is there. Photographer and subject work together to get the message out that injury has been incurred. Social justice. I like the idea that, rather than exploiting these injured persons, the photographer is there to show the injustice of what is happening, and that photography is the medium of this civil contract, to be expanded on further down.

4. Sontag says that only the rich few in the world have the luxury of being far enough away from conflict and suffering to overgeneralize reality as a spectacle. And yes, it is cliche for people to speak about conflict photography as cynically as they do. But I think she was right on the money with, at least television. TV news never gives you anything than a flash of an image or a 15-second sound-bite and then it moves on to the next thing. Aside from the news, there's the phenomenon of reality becoming a spectacle in reality television shows, Youtube viral video stars, Twitter and more. Everyone and anyone can become a spectacle in the US.

5. This idea was intriguing to me: "To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited." She also mentions ancient grievances, when people say "Never forget" or "Don't forget" in relation to an injustice against their people. Too much remembering does embitter. I was thinking about racial/ethnic/religious/gender tensions and thinking about where they stem from and how memory does embitter, but memory is vital to change at the same time. I think it's what you do with memory that counts. To stand around and be hurt and angry is useless, to be hurt and angry and do something about it is change we need in this world.

6. Watching:
     A) Sontag:

          Images have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if there were some other way of watching. But watching up close--without the mediation of an image--is still just watching.

      B) Azoulay:

 Photography is much more than what is printed on photographic paper. The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb "to watch" is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image. When and where the subject of the photograph is a person who has suffered some form of injury, a viewing of the photograph that reconstructs the  photographic situation and allows a reading of the injury inflicted on others becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation. This skill is activated the moment one grasps that citizenship is not merely a status, a good, or a piece of private property possessed by the citizen, but rather a tool of struggle or an obligation to others to struggle against injuries inflicted on those others, citizen and noncitizen alike--others who are governed along with the spectator.

Sontag's point about watching goes on to say that perhaps since we can do nothing about others sufferings, we become cynical to the imagery we see. I think that is valid, but I prefer Azoulay's ideas on the subject. In fact, I love her entire idea of the photographic act.
      The photographic act: the subject, the photographer, and the viewer all take part in it and it conveys a message between them. The subject knows why the photographer is there, not always to profit, but to look at what is happening and say, this is wrong, the subject also believes what is happening is wrong, and so together they collaboratively participate in this act. The photograph is shown to a viewer on the principal that, not everyone will care, but those that will may be called into action against this injustice.
     Azoulay proposes that the photographic act and the photographic medium is outside the reigns of sovereign power, outside the realms of the state. Those participating in these acts may be in a territory ruled by the same state, while one may be a citizen and another a noncitizen, they are still governed by the space they occupy. However, the photograph makes everyone equal because no one can regulate it. The photograph is a voice, a call to action, a reminder, a civil contract, all at once.


Rape as an invisible crime and what that says about discrimination against women is up next, after I get off work at 1PM, but until then, here is an article to get you thinking about that idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/kristof-In-This-Rape-Center-the-Patient-Was-3.html