Questioning Authenticity Elizabeth Losh http loshucsdedu Media Seductions and Election Day How do narratives like the one in Uncle Toms Cabin make appeals differently from ID: 398011
Download Presentation The PPT/PDF document "CAT 1: Media Seductions" is the property of its rightful owner. Permission is granted to download and print the materials on this web site for personal, non-commercial use only, and to display it on your personal computer provided you do not modify the materials and that you retain all copyright notices contained in the materials. By downloading content from our website, you accept the terms of this agreement.
Slide1
CAT 1: Media SeductionsQuestioning Authenticity
Elizabeth
Losh
http://
losh.ucsd.eduSlide2
Media Seductions and Election Day
How do
narratives
, like the one in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, make appeals differently from images? How are documentaries and made-for-TV movies different from conventional political ads? How does race and representation still play a role in our national political discourse?Slide3
How’s My Driving?Don’t Forget the Survey!
Slide4
Coffee with a Prof, Dine with a Prof
Slide5
Make Sure to Bring Your Book to Lecture and Section!
Slide6
Susan Sontag1933-2004
On Photography
(1977) and
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Slide7
Thinking about Multiple MediaCulture, Art, and Technology
Some items in the list of our course description:
“paintings, novels, plays, newspapers, photographs, films, comic books, television shows, videogames, and social network sites”
Which ones does Sontag talk about? Which ones does she add?(Page 83 for what this is) Slide8
Reading with Time and Place in Mind
School of Athens, Greece 450 BCE – 325 BCE
The Age of Sensibility in England 1750-1820
Pre-Civil War United States 1845-1860U.S. Occupation of the Philippines 1899-1913The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939Weimar and Nazi Germany 1919-1933 and 1933-1945World War II - U.S. War with Japan 1941-1945The McCarthy Era in the United States 1947-1957
Urban England: A Clockwork Orange 1962 and 1971The Post-9/11 World of Digital Media Slide9
Why the Spanish Civil War?1936-1939
“the first war to be witnessed (‘covered’) in the modern sense: by a corps of professional photographers at the lines of military engagement and in the towns under bombardment, whose work was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines” (21)
“guaranteed the attention of many cameras because they were invested in the meaning of larger struggles” (36)
“seen in a photo album or printed on rough newsprint” (120)Slide10
The War’s Literary and Artistic Record
Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso,
The Three Guineas GuernicaSlide11
The Site of an Iconic Image
Robert
Capa’s
“The Falling Soldier” (32-35, 47, 60-61, 120)Slide12
Original Context (Sontag 32)
Slide13
David Seymour or “Chim
”
“Land Distribution Meeting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936”
(Sontag 30-31)Slide14
Luis Martin-Cabrera
Slide15
Testimony and Evidence
Slide16
Why is this book not illustrated? Goya,
The Disasters of WarSlide17
Slide18
Slide19
SontagPathos and the Legacy of Aristotle
“Pity can entail a moral judgment if, as Aristotle maintains, pity is considered to be the emotion that we owe only to those enduring undeserved misfortune.” (Sontag 75)
“They weep, in part, because they have seen it many times. People want to weep. Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” (Sontag 83)Slide20
Sontag Reads Plato: 96-97Leontius
in Book IV of The
Republic
“He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, at at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried. ‘There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.’”
Weegee, “Their First Murder”Slide21
Ron Haberle at the My Lai Massacre
(Sontag 90-91)
Slide22
Ron Haviv
at the
Bijeljina
Massacre(Sontag 89-90)Slide23
Today’s Thesis
Authenticity
, for Sontag, becomes just one of the many superficial objections that she dismisses in defending the truth claims of photojournalism.
Regarding the Pain of Others is largely a book that presents a series of counterarguments to the broad generalizations of other public intellectuals in contemporary debates about media influence who assert that dramatic images 1) tend not to be authentic, 2) aestheticize suffering, 3) glorify graphic violence, 4) invade the privacy of victims, 5) desensitize the public, or 6) render reality as a spectacle. While Sontag presents nuanced arguments against these detractors, she does so by reading remarkably few precise visual details in the complex images that she cites as evidence. Slide24
Immediacy and Synchronicity“To Catch a Death”
Pulitzer Prize winning photograph by Eddie Adams of “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon”
(Sontag 59-60)Slide25
Sontag 60
More upsetting is the opportunity to look at people who know that they have been condemned to die: the cache of six thousand photographs taken between 1975 and 1979 at a secret prison in a former high school in
Tuol
Sleng, a suburb of Phnom Penh, the killing house of more than fourteen thousand Cambodians charged with being either “intellectuals” or “counter-revolutionaries.”Slide26
Slide27
Slide28
Huỳnh
Công
Út / Nick Ut (57)Why is there no doubt about authenticity?Slide29
Slide30
What Constitutes a “Staged” Photograph
Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima (56)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YedHaLF5So
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKuym66LIr4 Slide31
Images of Antietamfrom the studio of Mathew Brady
Slide32
Alexander Gardner“The home of a Rebel Sharpshooter”
Slide33
Robert Doisneau (Sontag 55)
Slide34
Roman VishniacSlide35
Vishniac’s A Vanished WorldSlide36
John HeartfieldSlide37
Image alteration under StalinSlide38
Iranian PhotoshopSlide39
Slide40
Slide41
Slide42
Reagan’s TearEditorializing with Photoshop
Tim O’BrienSlide43
Blogs and Photoshop
darkblackSlide44
The Beautiful PoorSebastião
Salgado,
Migrations
(78-80)Slide45
“The Face of War”Slide46
Ernst FriedrichSlide47
How Personal Identity Matters