Tuesday 21 February 2012

Censorship & Truth

Quality of photograph in creation of truth / /
Photographic manipulation / /
Censorship of advertising / /
Censorship in art & photography.


Software can be used to 'improve' a photographs quality, used as a tool of manipulation.
- digital photography is a 'code' that exists within this environment.
- against this, multiple photographs can be reproduced and altered slightly with different darkroom techniques applied - this will alter the way the photograph can be received


Ansel Adams 

Stalin & Nikolai Yezhov 
- Manipulated image in Pravda
- Newspaper doctored the news 
The news is censored and manipulated to give the viewer something that they think should be read / / accepted as the news.

Kate Winslet / / GQ Magazine
- Legs longer
- Body skinnier.
Difference was very far from the truth.  Sends a different message.
Photographs are manipulated in order to sell a story / / dramatise the way in which in it perceived by the viewer / / seeks attention. i.e photographs from Iraq, viewing allied soldiers in a low light.

Robert Capa
Death of a loyalist soldier, 1936
Is it real? 
Does it even matter if it isn't? 
This photograph was up for discussion for a long time - proved he almost certainly is dead.
The truth of images can be coloured by the caption they are put with, especially in the case of 'Death of a loyalist soldier'.  Using the word 'death' instantly adds drama and danger to the photograph that was perhaps not necessarily there before a name.  The word 'loyalist' gives the image personality, moreover, it makes the soldier more human than purely being referred to as 'death of a soldier', which holds a sense of detatchment, as if he doesn't deserve a name.  Such a lack of personality connotes that he means nothing, a more neutral view of war / / killing of people.  However, the use of the word 'loyalist' reflects visually in the tone of the photograph, with the grand setting and low camera angle, the viewer feels on level with this person, adding emotion.

Manipulative advertising, 1984 
Is it rational / / 
or suggestive of what people want their viewer to be seeing
Simulacrum - phases of image. 
- reflection of a basic reality 
- Jean Baudrillard 
Peter Turnley 
- The unseen Gulf War / / photographs documenting the Gulf War.
The photos were approved by the U.S army, which means they are far from telling the truth of any form.  However, his book offers all the unpublished images, this meant that people had the opportunity to see what really happened and form an opinion of their own, uncensored.

Jean Baudrillard 
Book- The Gulf War did not take place (1996) 
Forces the point that it was a war that took place as a simulation of other wars. 
- manipulated representation of war 
- Strategized media event
Monochrome
- 'arty' - colour as opposed to black and white making it more real? 

Contrived representation of reality.
An-My-Lee - Small Wars
- Fine art photographer turned to capturing war.  Is there a place for this style of photography or is Turnley's more valid? 
"landscape photograph with some tanks in it" 

Censorship
- The practice or policy of censoring films, letters or publications 
- Objectionable
- Standards of right and wrong
Theodore Levitt 
- The morality of Advertising, 1970 
Cadbury's Flake advertising 1969
- orgasmic situations 
- 'Inserting' a chocolate bar into her mouth / / perhaps says more about the viewer than it does about the images themselves. 
Oliviero Toscani, United Colours of Benetton, 1992
- Photographer building a career off adverts meant to shock
Balthus, the Golden Years 
Does the fact that it's a painting make it acceptable to be graphic?
Amy Adler - The Folly of defining 'serious' art
- The Miller Test. 1973. 
When art starts to become too graphic. 
- Obsenity law. 
'It comes from the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in Miller v. California (1973), in which Chief Justice Warren Burger (writing for the majority) held that obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment. The definition he used went like this:
The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest ... (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. If a state obscenity law is thus limited, First Amendment values are adequately protected by ultimate independent appellate review of constitutional claims when necessary.
Courts have traditionally held that sale and distribution of obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment, but that possession of obscene material is protected by the right to privacy.'
Source

Sally Mann
Sally Mann - Candy Cigarette, 1989
A mother who photographs her children and publishes them. 
Should a mother be showing images like this, and what is happening?

Should she do this or is it different because they are her own children. Family photos... 
'A REVOLTING EXHIBITION OF PERVERSION UNDER THE GUISE OF ART ' 
News of The World
Richard Prince - Spiritual America, 2005 
What should we believe? should we be protected from it?
Related back to the Miller test.
A fairly controversial view, however, is a force against the negative views of these photographs:
“[T]o imagine a new art, one must break the ancient art.”
—Marcel Schwob

This works for Manns work.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Surveillence & Society

"….it constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes and ideal functioning, but one that is reduced, in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism of life and death: that which moved brings death, & one kills that which moves. "

1791 - The Panopticon - Foucault saw this as a metaphor for discipline & social control.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

(1926 - 1984)

- Madness & civilization 

- Discipline & punish : the birth of the prison. 

Both writings analyse the rise of institutions & the power they hold.


Madness & civilization

- The great confinement (late 1600s)
  "mad people" at first were accepted in society, as if they were the village idiot.
- Then, those who were deemed not useful to society were put into 'Correctional Housing'.  Not only for those classed as 'insane', it included criminals, the unemployed and single mothers - forced to work through violent threats.
In light, people saw that these correctional houses were not just - new methods were looked into.  Such combinations of different people meant that everyone was affected by the criminals and in the end, they were all corrupt, no matter what they had initially been forced in there for.
 
These 'new' methods included specialised institutions such as asylums for the insane, where the 'patients' were treat like children and forced to work on the basis of a reward system.  There was a distinct shift from physical control to mental manipulative control.  Something still prevelant to this day.
From the back of this there was a need for more control.  This force of control came in the from of specialists / / professionals such as doctors and psychiatrists.  Tool of legitimisation.
Internalised responsibility

Used to be punished in the most violent / / public way possible
i.e. Guy Fawkes
Not meant to correct their behavior but used as a device to control them, by showing what will happen - being made an example of.

Disciplinary society & disciplinary power

Foucault describes 'discipline' as a TECHNIQUE OF MODERN SOCIAL CONTROL
The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals.
‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.

Jeremy Benthams PANOPTICON
"a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."
Was proposed in 1791- never became reality
- Bentham thought it could have multiple functions / / school / / asylum / / prison.
'The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.
The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and madhouses, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term.'

A circular construction with rooms around the outside and a central tower with a view of all the rooms.
Each room is back lit so that the subject is clearly visible.
The central tower is in darkness so that the inmates cannot see into the central tower.







Presidio, Cuba

Same Panoptic principle.
Perfect example of panopticism.



Inmates on constant display, whilst being isolated, they are being watched / / constant possibility of being watched.

They know there is a high possibility that they are being watched but it is not certain due to the central tower (representing institutional power) a) being so small in comparison, and b) not being lit.

Possibility of being watched at any moment has a big impact on the way the inmates behave.
Begin to control own behaviour.
After time, there no longer needed to be a guard in the tower because the very fact that the tower was there was enough.  The inmates had already associated the tower with guards / / discipline.  The tower is a perfect device for control.  Tower = (Foucaults version) 'discipline' 

"Machine for automatic functioning of power".

PANOPTICISM
/ /
Emergence (for foucault) of a new model for control.
Main aim of panopticism is training.  'Training' / / mental manipulation to control the minds of those under scrutiny.
The whole concept rests on the idea that the 'trainee' has to be watched / / think that they are being watched.  In order for them to change the way they act they have to think that someone is taking note of everything they do.  This is the only way to be successful.


E.G in practice:

- Open plan office

- Libraries

No one tells you to be quiet or to control yourself, you just d0

CCTV, Google maps.

these build into you the fear of always being caught out because there could always be someone watching you.


Prevention / /

college cards / /
Hours - clocking in & out of college / / work.
Relationship between power, knowledge & body 

- direct relationship between mental control & physical responses.
People become 'Docile' obedient bodies.
- Self monitoring
- Self correcting

- Obedient.


Facebook
/ /
Everything posted - everyone can see.
Create your own identity that you want people to see of you.
Vito Acconci
'Following piece' (1969)
Follow someone - stalking
We believe we are in control of our actions when we are in fact not at all - we are already trained.


We are all docile bodies.