Why Aren't We Getting It? Photography in the Information Age by Hilary Masin

Why Arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t We Getting It? Photography in the Information Age

Hilary Masin Dissertation: Contextual Study - 2MED614 Word count: 9775

BA (Hons) Contemporary Media Practice 2013/14

School of Media, Art and Design University of Westminster

Abstract This study is an effort to shed light on how photography has changed both as a form of communication and as a creative practice within the context of the Information Age. I will investigate how photojournalism, especially since the 1994 media-missed ethnic genocide in Rwanda, has gradually collapsed as a vehicle for large-scale information delivery, and by what means its validity may be restored in the field of communication. Within the framework of our current postmodern condition I will draw on studies by Debord, Baudrillard, Lukรกcs and McLuhan and concentrate of notions of simulation, spectacle, and compassion fatigue with the purpose of examining the connection between vision, conscience and action; I will survey the psychological effects of advertising and mainstream media and how they influence the construction of identities within the Information Age, also citing the work of Alfredo Jaar and his aversion to our current visually encumbered condition. I will then study the work of photographers Norfolk, Burtynsky, Salgado and Gursky and, eventually, aim to devise from this investigation possible answers to compassion fatigue and attempt to retrieve new photographic approaches that may interest the forthcoming, digital audiences of the future.

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Acknowledgements I want to thank Graham, Chris, Peter and Adam for the knowledge I have gained critically and academically over the past two years, and for the support I have had in pursuing my hopes and ambitions in writing. I must also thank my mother Gillian for being an English teacher, for helping me understand the importance of grammar and punctuation, and for giving me books instead of Gameboys when I was a child. She taught me that reading is a prerequisite for writing, and nothing could ever have prepared me more for my education in university. I also want to thank Graham for pushing me to the very limit with this dissertation: I would never have been able to get this far without so much encouragement.

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Table of Contents ! Abstract .................................................................................................................................. i! Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... ii! Table of Contents ................................................................................................................. iii! 0! Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1! 1! Foreword: the Decline of Photojournalism ...................................................................... 5! 2! The Information Age and Simulation ............................................................................ 13! 2.1! Falsely Physical in the Western World .................................................................. 14! 3! Audiences and the Spectacle of Advertising ................................................................. 19! 3.1! Off-Screen Virtual Reality ..................................................................................... 21! 4! Understanding, Conscience and Action ......................................................................... 24! 4.1! Abu Ghraib and Horror Gossip .............................................................................. 27! 4.2! Wikileaks, Flat Earth News and Investigative Journalism .................................... 32! 5! Galleries of Horror ......................................................................................................... 35! 5.1! Tactical Beauty: Sublime or Sublimated? .............................................................. 37! 6! Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 45! 7! Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 48! 7.1! Literary References ................................................................................................ 48! 7.2! Visual References .................................................................................................. 53!

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0 Introduction

!Martin!Parr!and!friends!(2005)!Road%Trip,!published!by!Sony!Ericsson.!All!of!the!images!in!this! book!were!shot!on!Sonyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s!latest!mobile!phone!at!the!time,!the!K750.!

We are living in the Information Age: a computerised, knowledge-based era in which intellectual material becomes profitable, spins the web of an ever-growing cyber economy, and governs contemporary society. By turning all abstract effects such as feelings and emotions into seemingly concrete, exchangeable objects, screen media crosses the gap between tangible and intangible, obscuring the significance of physical existence. Cross-media marketing is knitted into the very fabric of our lives, from the entertainment industry1, to broadcast news, to social media, even to the food we consume, turning not only our physical but also our intellectual existence into a marketplace. It is within this marketplace that I wish to set my research: vehicles of information such as photojournalism are operating now more than ever in a desperate attempt to reach out and grab audiencesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; attention through new high-tech channels of communication, but

In Advertainment: The Evolution of Product Placement as a Mass Media Marketing Strategy, Susan Kretchmer examines the particular case of in-game advertising, which is particularly interesting to consider on the subject of media influence on children.

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their revolutionary, change-inspiring purpose seems to be more overlooked now than ever before. So why arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we getting it? This study is an attempt to clarify how the role of photography has changed in the Information Age. I wish to understand how it has gradually collapsed as a vehicle for the delivery of information to large audiences, and whether there are any ways to restore its validity as a means of effective communication. Within the framework of our current postmodern condition, I will examine the relationship between vision, conscience and action; my eventual aim is to devise possible answers to compassion fatigue and endeavour to find new photographic approaches that may interest forthcoming audiences in the digital age of information.

!!!!!

Gilles!Peress!(1995)!The%Silence,!Scalo,!Zurich.!

With the first chapter, I aim to frame the origin of my interest in this topic: the decline of photojournalism. Taking photographic records of the Rwandan genocide as my main argument, I wish to indicate how the posthumous nature of the documentation det-

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rimentally affected both photographers and audiences, and damaged the connection between them2. I will then frame the Information Age in terms of communication media, simulation and the loss of physical awareness. Introducing my argument with the overwhelming effect of junk images on contemporary society3, I will talk about how our ability to focus our attention and to define the importance of information has deteriorated. I will discuss whether to be in physical terms is even relevant to our current existence, and examine the notion of physicality within Western society, referencing Debord, Baudrillard, and Alfredo Jaar’s work in order to set the grounds for my following argument. By taking these notions of mainstream media into further scrutiny4, I will frame and narrow down my analysis of contemporary society in terms of how identities are moulded and established by the ‘Spectacle of Advertising’. I will talk about how, influenced by the fear of social expectations, virtual reality has become a human condition governed by social networks, online media, and consumer society. Once I have assembled the context of society as it stands in the first decade of the Twenty-first Century, in Chapter Four I will examine case studies of ways in which audiences’ glazed attentiveness has, in actual fact, been awoken. I will particularly concentrate on the scandal of Abu Ghraib and how it made the disregard of gossipabsorbed media audiences impossible. In the broader context of communication media, I

2 As audiences drifted off into cyberspace, photographers gradually lost their hope in the revolutionary power of the photographic practice. I will look at French Magnum photographer Gilles Peress, along with the many other reporters who witnessed the genocide but whose work was filtered by the media, and therefore not heard in time by Western audiences. 3 As also argued by Susan Moeller in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell disease, Famine, War and Death (2003). 4 I will discuss this especially in terms of Debord’s spectacle. 5 In Lukács’ terms, that is to say. 6 On 16th June 1976, a group of high-school students initiated a series of protests against the in-

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will then focus on the reification of journalists5, and consider Flat Earth News and Wikileaks’ roles in shaping a new method for the successful distribution of information. Setting my final chapter within this framework, I will examine how the creative practice of photography has been employed to reach beyond simple visual reception and to stimulate an active response, particularly with reference to the gallery space. I will study the cases of Norfolk’s and Burtynsky’s ‘beauty expedient’, confronting them with Romantic painting; I will then go on discussing the role of the gallery space and whether it sublimates subjects and subject matters to a purely aesthetic presence, especially contemplating Salgado’s Genesis.

In Lukács’ terms, that is to say.

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1 Foreword: the Decline of Photojournalism “I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies […] In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behaviour” (Nachtwey, 2007)

Gilles!Peress!(1994)!Photographer%James%Nachtwey,%covering%the%Rwandan%civil% war,%carries%a%baby%girl%orphaned%by%the%massacres%there%to%a%shelter,!Zaire!

Throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century, photojournalism was a powerful vehicle for the distribution of information. Like spotlights in the darkness of ignorance and unawareness, photographs would expose truths and reveal things unseen with the aim of obtaining an active response from the public, fuelling the resistance to war and injustice, stirring public opinion and debate. Issues were given real human faces, making it no longer possible for them to be abstract components in audiences’ thoughts and beliefs. As a matter of fact, two years after the alarming photographs of the 1976 Soweto uprising6 had spread all over the Western world, UNESCO called for the first World Conference

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Against Racism to discuss South Africa’s apartheid policies7. Western opposition to racial segregation grew ever stronger from then on: the US passed an Anti-Apartheid Act in the late 80s, and the South African government was put under increasing international pressure for the release of Nelson Mandela, and to put an end to apartheid8. Despite the written press being more or less politicised and opinionated, the work of photographers such as Nzima, Alfred Kumalo and Ian Berry stirred and intensified public opinion’s support of anti-apartheid efforts both within South Africa and internationally.

Sam!Nzima!(1976)!16 !June,!Mbuyiso!MaO khubo!carrying!Hector!Pieterson!and!his! sister,!Antoinette,!running!alongside.!!

Graeme!Williams/South!Photos/Africa!Media! Online.!Anti!apartheid!poster,!struggle!days,!June! 16!(now!Youth!Day)!Hector!Petersen!museum.!

On 16th June 1976, a group of high-school students initiated a series of protests against the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of education in local schools in Soweto, South Africa. (www.sahistory.org.za) 7 The BBC first reported on the uprising in Soweto that same day, causing international sympathy to strengthen the anti-apartheid campaign, while “attempts by white minority rulers to clamp down on the protest movement were met with increasing resistance” (BBC) 8 In Another Kind of War Phillips and Coleman (1989) stated that there was an “almost complete international consensus on the need for political initiatives – including negotiations between the State and the ANC – to bring the system of apartheid to an end”

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In other words, the public’s collective awareness was constantly being provoked by new visual stimuli, keeping audiences alert and ready to react: photographs were, effectively, changing – or having a strong influence on – the course of worldly events. Just as the media triumphantly covered Mandela’s election and the end of racial segregation in South Africa however, the U.N. Peacekeeping force turned its back on the rest of the continent, allowing the worst bloodbath of the 90s to occur uninterrupted in Rwanda. Western governments refused to recognise it as genocide, since this would surely entail the duty to intervene (Nachtwey, 2011), and almost a million Rwandans were bashed, stoned and hacked to death with farm tools9. Ghastly aftermath images suddenly appeared in mainstream media10, taking audiences unaware and unprepared. They were, however, set aside: there was nothing left to be done about the case, if not to look at the documentation of it and recoil in horror. Perhaps this crushing knowledge, the realisation of their inability to change what had happened, largely contributed to the onset of public lethargy by establishing a sort of collectively agreed refusal to cry over spilled milk11. Perhaps the general public was no longer empathic to unrest and conflict, it no longer understood matters such as Rwanda, or famine, or death; partly because the media no longer had any interest in reporting such things, and partly because most western struggles and upheavals had shifted from the Western world, away from the weakening scope of public concern12. Following the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama (1989) predicted such a phenomenon as the “end of history” in the West. He did not necessarily imply the end of international conflict, nor did he suggest the media would ever fail to report it (Rwanda was admittedly covered by

http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_rwanda.html contains extensive historical information, records and analyses of the genocide. 10 Alan Kuperman (2000) stated in an International Press Institute report, “western media blame the international community for not intervening quickly, but the media must share blame for not immediately recognizing the extent of the carnage and mobilizing world attention to it” 11 Only it wasn’t spilled milk, it was an ignored case of mass murder. 12 All conflicts and wars in the 90s were taking place outside of Europe and the US.

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the Press, after it happened). By claiming that the realm of the ideal and “post-historical” would “govern the material world in the long run” (1989), he argued that the West would become so estranged from the rest of the world that it would no longer be capable of understanding its issues, which is exactly what took place. For the first time journalists and photographers felt hopeless, frustrated and baffled: there was nobody (who genuinely cared) left to communicate with. The missed – or otherwise generally ignored – case of Rwanda, along with the frustration of trying to communicate with a non-listening audience, turned out to be the first step into journalists’ disillusionment of making change with their work. Gilles Peress’ deeply harrowing, black-paged book about Rwanda The Silence contains hardly any text. Only the first page, accompanied by the photograph of a man, reads: “Rwanda, Kabuga, 27 May 1994, 16h:15. A prisoner, a killer is presented to us, it is a moment of confusion, of fear, of prepared stories. He has a moment to himself” (Peress, 1995)

The!first!image!in!The%Silence!(Peress,!1995)!

Then, a horrifying, unremitting flow of black and white photographs portrays the mass murder: victims, corpses, refugees, bloody farm tools, piles of dead bodies and dust

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thicken the book’s contents into a dense mass of dismay and anguish, and no amount of brutality or gore is spared. The pages become heavier and heavier with the photographers’ despair in the face of the silence of Western Media, of the inevitability of an on-going slaughter, of his own powerless recording. “Rwanda, Kabuga, 27 May 1994, 16h:18. As I look at him he looks at me” (Peress, 1995)

The!final!image!of!The%Silence!(Peress,!1995)!

The same man from the opening image photographed a few minutes later stares at the reader from the final page. A connection is made if only for an instant, and we “imagine our own witnessing” (Blocker, 2009); the man’s angry, disturbing glare turns into a chilling, gunshot-like rupture in time and space. The photographer’s frustration, anger and desperation are almost palpable, deeply embedded within the pages of the book, screaming out at the readers, furiously demanding ‘why was nothing done to stop this?’

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Many reports were filed, numerous photographic documentations were available for editors to publish, many survivors and refugees were being interviewed, but no material made it into mainstream media until it was far too late for any sort of intervention13. The question is: why?

Karsten!Thielker!(1994)!Refugees!carrying!water!containers!make!their!way!back!to!their!huts!at!the!BenaO co!Refugee!Camp!in!Tanzania!near!the!Rwandan!border!in!May!1994.%

James!Nachtwey!(1994)!A!Hutu!man!who!did!not!support!the!Tutsi!genocide!in!Rwanda,!was!imO prisoned!in!a!concentration!camp,!starved!and!attacked!with!machetes.!He!managed!to!survive! after!he!was!freed!and!was!placed!in!the!care!of!the!Red!Cross,!Rwanda.!

Fergal Keane gave the first decent coverage of the genocide in June that year. With the Panorama episode Journey into Darkness (a chronology of Panorama reports on Rwanda is available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3585473.stm)

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Journalists Tom Giles and Anne Chaon claim that Rwanda was a media failure14, and caused great bitterness and disappointment to all those who wanted to report on what was going on (Chaon, 2007, p. 165). BBC correspondent Mark Doyle (2003) claims that it was not his job to encourage intervention, resentfully adds that the reason why help was not being given to soldiers trying to end the atrocities was that they were African (Doyle, 2003), and that the West was no longer interested in them whatsoever. Lindsey Hilsum15 blames this on the post-Cold War international climate insisting that the West was economically and strategically disinterested in Africa, and because of this media treatment of humanitarian disasters, along with aid policy and practice, was being focused and supported elsewhere (2007, p. 168). Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000 virtually condenses this opposition: a “post-historical” (Fukuyama, 1989), indifferent West is juxtaposed to the events that were actually taking place in Rwanda in an extremely unnerving series of visual couplings. One of them places the cover of the 1994, April 18th issue of Newsweek featuring a portrait Kurt Cobain (who had committed suicide two weeks previously) and the title Suicide: Why Do People Kill Themselves? next to a small block of text, stating that relief officials estimated that “25,000 people had been killed in Kingali alone in the first five days of violence” (Jaar, 1994).

14 “As journalists, we were rightly quick to condemn the inaction of the UN and the wider international community over Rwanda. But many of those who tried to cover this appalling story as it happened around them still harbour, as I do, a lingering sense of helplessness” Giles (2004) remorsefully admits ten years after the massacre. 15 Lindsey Hilsum was one of only two Western journalists on the ground in Rwanda at the time of the genocide and is in a unique position to describe media coverage of the genocide and the disproportionate attention paid to the plight of Hutu refugees who had fled to Goma. (Thompson, 2007, xv)

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Alfredo!Jaar!(1994)!The%Rwanda%Project,%1994@2000!

On the one hand, the 90s physically removed conflict from the Western world, and lead to a diminishing in empathy on behalf of the masses towards situations of stress and disorder. On the other hand, specifically within the Western world and partly because of this shift in conflict, the 90s were a decade of innovation. New television series from the States were being exported and were becoming popular in Europe16, new media technologies were enabling the development and rapid distribution of video games17, cultural diversity within workplaces and schools was becoming more and more ordinary, and pioneering movements in music such as grunge, pop and hip hop were being fuelled by new, upcoming artists and bands all over the western world. In addition to this, alongside an increasingly verbally, audio-visually and digitally encumbered culture, the 90s were also the decade of the commercialisation of the Internet.

Friends, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Full House and The Simpsons are just some of the television series born in the 90s that are still popular and showing today. 17 Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider, some of the most popular video games of all time, were first released in the mid-90s along with the PlayStation.

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2 The Information Age and Simulation “The culture industry perpetually cheats its customers of what it perpetually promises.” (Adorno, 1975, p. 139)

Since the 90s, within the framework of Western culture and society, media communications have evolved at an unfathomably rapid pace: jumpstarted by the Internet, communication has exploded into a million, on-going, simultaneous, instantaneous conversations. Debord, author of The Society of The Spectacle, would say that we are unified in our very isolation from reality, that society is founded on the heterogeneous unification of many separate instances. We may coexist and live together, but essentially, we are inaccessible to one another. Although sometimes we may come together and form small centres of cohesion, just usually, eventually, they too disperse. An example of digitally driven cohesion that resulted in physical action was the recent worldwide Occupy movement: building its forces through twitter and Facebook, it ultimately became a concrete bodily experience for those who followed.

Leon!Neal!(2011)!Julian!Assange!speaking!to!proO testers!from!the!steps!of!St!Paul's!cathedral.!!

Matthew! Lloyd! (2012)! Occupy! London! protesters! outside!St!Paul's!Cathedral!before!the!eviction.!

A campsite was set in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in New York’s Zuccotti Park, and streets in major cities all over the world were filled with demonstrators,

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acting together in accordance to collective beliefs and ideals18. Although it has now backtracked to an almost exclusively online existence, important as it is interesting to considconsider, this web movement prompted action on a global scale. Political and military heads trembled in the shadow of this online-to-concrete development’s potentials. Anything that originates within the Internet is very much like wildfire just waiting for that initial trigger to instantly spread throughout cyberspace, or as it were, to go viral. Understandably, the thought of this cyber-wildfire reverberating into the real world is, for many, a daunting one: simply because the Internet is neither good nor evil, it’s just a blank canvas ready to turn into anything. Although the Occupy movement was peaceful and strived for the rights of the many19, the process by which it was transformed from being an online movement to a full-sized on-street protest remains sinister and is still disapproved of. Our concrete involvement in the physical world is slowly fading into a mediated experience. Concepts that have a physical actuality overlap with others, become indistinct and unclear, and eventually become non-important in favour of the complex web of psychological interpretations of the world that we are caught up in.

2.1

Falsely Physical in the Western World In the context of communication media, if photographs were once vivid spotlights

onto otherwise darkened information, much like in Alfredo Jaar’s Lament of the Images we are now flooded by so much light all around that it’s impossible to see where the spotlights are pointing. We are very much like disoriented children standing in the middle of a floodlit football field, while several different games are being played at once: we no long-

As Nachtwey (2007) puts it, a “shared sense of conscience” Their famous slogan “we are the 99%” was an invitation to embrace one another and unite against injustice and the indifference of the few, in some respects also denoting trust in the majority of humankind. 19

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er know where to look or how to direct our sight. Our eyes are so sore from looking at horror, pain and suffering that we just want to find a darkened area on which to rest them, or a distraction in which to relieve ourselves of the stressful burden of our overloaded vision. In addition to this, the constantly evolving expedients of communication technology (social media, mobile phones that can hook up to Internet, the Internet itself) have brought so much audio-visual noise on us that the floodlit football field metaphor should also feature a travelling fairground.

Alfredo!Jaar!(2002)!Lament%of%the%Images!

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re dazed, confused and overwhelmed. We carry Facebook notifications, text messages, Google searches, e-mails, live streaming music, Instagram feeds and Calendar reminders with us all the time; when we look up from our small screens we see other, larger screens showing us women modelling with jewels and perfumes, unrealistically healthy, happy children posing with the new McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chicken burger or the latest Blockbuster movie poster, bright and colourful, the actors staring down at us from the Olympus of their gigantic picture.

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Our heads have been plunged into a parallel state of Baudrillardian20 simulation, in which information and communication become empty, self-devouring vessels of nothingness21. “Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudoworld apart, solely as an object of contemplation” (Debord, 1998, p.12): while we physically and biologically live as human beings, our lives are not controlled by our physicality but by what our minds perceive to be real and significant22, chiefly in aesthetic terms. A capitalist status quo is infused into our subconscious, converting us into pseudoindividuals, manipulated into becoming consumers of mass products, incapable of retaining any kind of individuality or independent sense of self. Our physical bodies have become mere image, the “visible indicator of the self”, an object to be “groomed”, fashioned and “stylized” (Featherstone, 2007, p. 21). It has been converted into a “reflexive project” (Giddens, 1991, p. 32) and manoeuvres “daily performances with a favourable social style” (Goffman 1990, p. 46). The way we experience social relations is becoming more and more blurred into the way we relate to each other on social media platforms like Facebook or twitter23; sex is subconsciously influenced by online pornography and the depictions of beauty we are constantly being prompted to emulate; even the food we consume is based on looks and advertising campaigns: we tend to eat what looks best in its packaging, what has been

There is, as Baudrillard (1994, p. 82) puts it, an “implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula” 21 “Baudrillard’s theory of media-saturated simulation owes much to McLuhan’s statement that ‘them medium is the message’” (Laughey, 2007, p. 150) 22 Marshall McLuhan’s studies on how minds can be manipulated and influenced by visual stimuli promoted by means of the media are here very relevant: the technologies utilised by the mass media make the Media, effectively, extensions of our bodies. The Frankfurt School also dealt with the issue of the influencing abilities of mass media in terms of a “culture industry”, tailored to the needs of mass consumption, “its influence over the consumers […] established by entertainment” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1979, p.136) 23 Words like selfie, srsly, tweetable, bloggable and whatevs have actually made it into the Oxford Dictionary (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/what-s-new). Srsly?

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advertised as ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ or ‘happy’24. In spite of the fact that it may contain harmful substances for the wellbeing of our body, we consume beautifully packaged food because it is aesthetically pleasing. If it makes us ill, we can buy medicines and remedies; if it makes us fat we can buy a gym membership, whey protein and energy supplements; if it gives us acne we can buy creams and face washes.

Barbara!Kruger!(1987)!Untitled%(I%shop%therefore%I%am),! photographic!silkscreen/vinyl!!

Unknown!artist,!My%thoughts%have%been% replaced%by%moving%images!(detourned! comic)! !

We are encumbered with products that shatter our understanding of existence in physical terms, absorb us into an on-going psychological counterpart of life, and turn us into urban, cyber-oriented presences structured by sets of conventional behaviours. Even those living in non-urban environments are very rarely unable to have web access, so where the urban ends, the Internet easily makes up for it, completely removing any physicality whatsoever from the relations it generates25. As Barbara Kruger declares in her

Ironically, a 2010 report found farms sourcing the popular “Happy Eggs” eggs to be guilty of mutilating the not-so-happy hens, and of controlling them by means of electrical wires (Viva.org.uk, 2010). 25 “Many of us have had the thrill of discovering a like mind through the Internet or some remote correlation to our own work on-line” (Pepperell, 2009)

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direct and hard-hitting artwork, we shop therefore we are: so “having must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d’être from appearances” (Debord, 1998, p. 16). Western societies are now able to access such a vast quantity of information through the Internet that knowledge becomes immeasurable, its end and true extension both obscure. The fact that we are incapable of ever grasping a hold on it, of mapping it out and truly understanding it is an overwhelming thought to reflect upon, and the same consequences can be applied to information: we are effectively drowning in it. Photojournalistic images of pain and destruction swim past us, caught up in a flood of accompanying text and various junk information, screaming out at us that there are things happening in the world that we should be paying attention to. Whether we choose to look at a starving child crying for help from a poster on an underground train, or at the most recent Volkswagen car blissfully cruising down a countryside road next to it is entirely up to us – or up to our virtual cyber-engrossed selves.

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3 Audiences and the Spectacle of Advertising “The more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires.” (Debord, 1998, p. 23)

Individuality constructs itself not only on a subjective level26, but is rather the product of a variety of external stimuli and influences combined with subjective selfperception. This is a complex process, which involves more than simple cause-effect sequences and empirical repercussions, and is structured within a dynamic system of social and cultural orders27. Lacan’s studies on the Mirror Stage are particularly interesting to consider in relation to this: individuals construct an archetypal idea of themselves, motivating selfabsorbed imaginations of how they would like to be, hence also motivating behaviours to make themselves so. By instituting an “imaginary other”, as Lacan defines it, the subject’s behaviour is subconsciously influenced within their real, material life. This situation relates strongly to our current existence within the digital age of information: we see posters, adverts, films, websites and television programs and are induced to fabricate subconscious stereotyped models of ourselves. We are being exposed to very specific forms of visual and more or less immersive communicative experiences, which are accurately developed and assembled to target subconscious reactions. Adverts become our mirrors, as it were, and we are constantly struggling to live up to our reflection. An obvious example of this is the rapport between women and eating disorders in contemporary

Protevi insists upon this point in Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, arguing that “above the subjective level we find a social field, itself multiple, which through its practices constitutes a field or population of subjects with varied affective and cognitive traits” (2009, p.3) 27 Philosopher Jacques Lacan extensively studied this structuring process, particularly in what he calls the mirror stage of self-determination. His studies take much from Freud’s studies on the development of self-perception.

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society. Most models in adverts and actresses in films or on television seem to be underweight; whether this is due to them actually being malnourished or to the photomanipulation of their images during post-production for publication, however, is an ongoing debate. In 2003, Kate Winslet commented on GQ’s slimming retouch of her legs saying, "the retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that" (Hellomagazine, 2003).

GQ!cover!starring!Kate!Winslet,!February!2003!

Vogue!cover!starring!Kate!Winslet,!November!2013!

It is quite remarkable to observe how the women portrayed in these manipulated (and manipulative) stereotypical images of beauty seem to be unable to impede their own aesthetic alteration. Actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence28, Emma Thompson and Rachel Weisz have also openly objected to the photoshoped warping of their images in adverts and fashion magazines29; their efforts, however, don’t seem to be obstructing the practice

“Girls see enough of this body that we can’t imitate, that we’ll never be able to obtain, these unrealistic expectations […] and we have control over that, so it’s an amazing opportunity to rid ourselves of that in this industry” Lawrence (2013) states in an interview for BBC. 29 They have apparently founded, with Winslet, the British Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League (Nathan, 2011)

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whatsoever. Winslet was in fact airbrushed once again into an alien-like unrealistic counterpart of herself for the cover of Vogue’s November 2013 issue. Female audiences are subconsciously being led to create unrealistic, idealised models of themselves30, gradually changing their habitual behaviours to make themselves thinner, in some cases inducing restrictive dietary lifestyles which may then turn into self-harming illnesses such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia31. To reduce our seemingly apathetic perceptive condition to a simple ‘we are drowned with information, therefore we are indifferent’ cause-effect circumstance would therefore be a very simplistic overview of a much more complex and controversial situation.

3.1

Off-Screen Virtual Reality Advertising images set examples to follow, subconsciously setting a boundary be-

tween what is and what is not acceptable. While the towering figures in movie posters become spectacular models to emulate, we are surreptitiously being given categories in which to fit. Whatever our personal style, we will always fall into a pre-constructed stereotype because we’re partly afraid, and partly incapable of doing otherwise. In the information age, human beings are created in typecasts. In 1979, Adorno and Horkheimer observed this phenomenon in capitalist terms and were surprisingly intuitive of what has in fact come to pass: they argued that the Culture Industry, manufacturer of cultural products for an audience of consumers, establishes a despotic, conformist and highly standardized hierarchical relation between the media and its audience, in spite of it apparently being egalitarian and varied. So although one may feel the pressure to conform to

That is to say, they have nothing to do with reality: they have no accurate counterpart in the real world. 31 Many studies have been conducted on the relationship between the media and eating disorders, such as Harrison’s The body electric: thin-ideal media and eating disorders in adolescents (2006), Gordon’s The Last Word (2007) and Anorexia and bulimia: Anatomy of a social epidemic

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set constructs of the self, their fulfilment establishes itself mainly as a self-gratifying, hedonistic activity32. Virtual reality has shifted from being an on-screen simulation to becoming a lucid state of mind: we are constantly being prompted to simulate our lives, channelling our existence through set structures of appearances, of looking and of being looked at. Audiences consume cultural products so as to better fit within the categories they aspire to emulate; when seen as the customers of capitalism, therefore, the commodities and products they live by become “like a work of art, auratic and mysterious” (Stallabrass, 1996, p. 157). Consumer audiences reject their physical existence in favour of an idealised, utopic, ever changing and constantly anticipated reality33. Guy Debord develops the idea of a society that is governed by “the autonomous movement of the non-life” (Debord, 1998, p. 12): a society that has lost any connection to reality whatsoever, in which the consumers/spectators are: “implied in all program strands of the mass media, but not of course, as a real reproduction of his or her biochemical, immunological, neurobiological and consciousness-related processes, but only as a social construct. The construct […] helps the function system of the mass media constantly to irritate itself with regard to its biological and psychic human environment” (Luhmann, 2000, p.74).

Yet the spectacle-bound society in which we live is not only governed by hierarchical structures of power, but also by the way we relate to one another on the same level. An example to consider on this matter is online pornography, which sets a standard for the much more intimate relationships between individuals. The fear of not being sexually appealing and of not being able to perform and behave like porn actors and actresses is an

(1990). All studies verge on the media’s accountability in distorting perceptions of body size in young girls, inducing restrictive dieting and unrealistic physique expectations. 32 “It is in the interests of manufacturers and retailers to present shopping as a leisure activity rather than a chore” (Stallabrass, 1996, p.151), hence making the entertainment industry the most profitable form of advertising and capitalist consumption on Earth. 33 Rebecca Feasey argues that “there exists a long history of the media being experienced as a shop window in which stars and celebrities are viewed as stylish mannequins on display for the female consumer to admire and emulate” (2008, p. 695)

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underlying highly influential factor in the way people behave in relation to one another, obscuring emotion in favour of aesthetics and the need to live up to examples. Most of our sexual lives are, essentially, enactments of how it’s supposed to be, as if someone could at any moment start filming or photographing us: we want to be spectacles for those relating to us. Social media, advertising and pornography administer our lives in a “permanent state of emergency” (Väliaho, 2012, p.64), in which the fear of being rejected, of not making the cut, sets an aesthetic hierarchy between individuals. On this matter, fear is not only to be considered in its most obvious literary sense, but also in its innumerable manifesting aspects. These may establish themselves as self-consciousness, shyness, introversion, and can be employed to manipulate automatic reactions and behaviours, with the side effects of also causing EDs or OCDs (Obsessive Compulsive Disorders, such as the incontrollable desire to shop for instance)34. “The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1979, p.167)

It is interesting therefore to consider fear in situations of social expectations, and apply it to the way in which media-based communication happens and manipulates audiences. To put it simply: if we react to fear and danger with automated behaviours, the media need only turn social expectations into something to be feared, and transform frivolous matters into detrimental dangers to our being to make our consciences grow overloaded and painful.

According to a recent study carried out by Pasi Väliaho, a key figure to consider on this subject is Paul MacLean (2012, p.73), according to which the human brain works according to an underlying archaic neurobiological structure: at its core, an inflexible, compulsive, neurotic and paranoid “seat of primitive emotions such as fear and aggression” (Dalgleich, 2004, p.583), its primary function “defence against danger involving fear mechanisms” (Väliaho, 2012, p.74).

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4 Understanding, Conscience and Action “The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled” (Berger, 1979, p. 7)

Supposedly, conscience triggers action in situations perceived to require it; however, the notion of what activates conscience to initiate action is debateable35. For that reason “how we see the world depends on the cognitive capacities of our eyes and brains to produce images. Cognition is always a construction by an observing system” (Luhmann, 2006, p. 217). By observation, one makes oneself cognisant of something. To be cognisant of a fact, however, does not necessarily mean that it is taken into a subjective conscience and dealt with on a more profound psychological level. In other words: merely seeing does not carry the same implications as looking does. Looking “involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power” (Sturken, Cartwright, 2001, p.10). The intentionality given to the act of looking is the channel through which the negotiation of “social relationships and meanings” (ibidem) happens, and therefore constitutes the passage between mere perceptive observation and conscious interpretation. This is why, as far as photojournalistic images are concerned, audiences in the 60s and 70s were so fervently involved in what was happening around the world. By making the intentional choice of looking at images, observers became the active participants of worldly events36, urging in turn the need for the physical involvement of international NGOs and relief operations37.

While juxtaposing Luhmann’s constructivist interpretation of cognition with Kant’s transcendental reading of it, Moeller favours Luhmann’s argument, according to which “cognition is not per se an act of consciousness” (2006, p. 169). 36 Participation intended both as psychological and/or bodily: this is what Nachtwey means when he talks about images becoming part of a “collective consciousness” (2007). 37 “Peress has remarked that his experiences of witnessing indescribable violence have caused him an ‘urgency to look at reality. As it is. And more.’” (Blocker, 2009, p. 57)

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At the times of effectively poignant photojournalism, the public was itself involved in social uprising and unrest38. Photographers were urging them to “peel off layers” of their eyes to see (Peress, 1997), and they were. They identified with the far away subjects of photojournalism essentially by their being human and by also being involved in conflict. “We care about those with whom we identify”, Moeller rightly argues in CompasCompassion Fatigue (2003, p. 20). This sentiment is accurately described by Väliaho as a “higher-order” emotion that entails “the recognition of the enemy39 as […] someone who could have been me” (2012, p. 76), which is precisely what empathy also implies. In a review of Jaar’s The Sound of Silence, an installation piece that uses Kevin Carter’s renowned photograph of a starving child in Sudan to deal with the controversial subject-photographer-audience connection, New York Times’ Roberta Smith (2009) argues, “one implication is that silence is impossible; thought is its own kind of noise. Another is that the real silence is passivity, humanity’s acquiescence to inhumanity”.

! “In!the!Sound%of%Silence!gallery! installation,!visitors!enter!a!large! enclosure!to!view!a!film.”!(Patrick! Andrade!for!The!New!York!Times)!

! Alfredo!Jaar!(2006)!The%Sound%of% Silence!displayed!at!Art!Basel,! Switzerland,!2013!

! Kevin!Carter’s!Pulitzer!PrizeOwinning!1993!photograph!of! starvation!in!Sudan.!Top,!some!of!the!text!of!Alfredo!Jaar’s!work,! which!is!based!on!the!photo.!Kevin!Carter/Megan!Patricia!Carter! Trust,!Sygma!—!Corbis!

The context of looking is heavily influencing: by shifting the viewpoint from which an image is looked at, the gravity given to its subject by the viewer also changes (Lister, Wells, 2001, p. 65). 39 In this context, the word enemy should be considered in the broader sense of other.

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So Alfredo Jaar’s “solemn black boxes” (Blocker, 2009, p. 60) question the absence of empathy, audiences’ (and photographers’) inability to truly see what they are being shown (and what they are photographing), because the flood of mainstream media’s images blinds them40. We come to wonder how we ever came to imagine ourselves as witnesses, and are challenged to reflect upon the controversial absence of a connection between witnessing atrocity and having some kind of responsibility towards it. Most of Western society is now comfortable enough to feel safe, secure, detached from any concretely life endangering “state of emergency” (ibidem, p. 64), and most importantly feels compelled by the pressure of social expectations to preoccupy itself with issues such as what iPhone model, shoe style or perfume fragrance to purchase. Because of this, the audiences of mass communication within the digital age tend to disregard and dismiss matters which do not directly affect their lives or which do not relate to their current state of affairs and interests. The feeling of being safe tends to make people uninterested, indolent, and reluctant to abandon the comfort of their protected (usually privileged) position41. In Compassion Fatigue, Moeller argues that “we tend to care most about those closest to us, most like us” (2003, p. 20), so by narrowing down the range of individuals who deserve our attention and consideration, we are (more or less unintentionally) enabling this self-numbing mechanism. The fear for one’s life has been replaced by the fear of not meeting societal standards of acceptance: audiences connect to advertisements divulged by Dior, Vogue, Volkswagen and Apple, they no longer identify with images of starving children, dead bodies and bomb-lit warzones. They may feel for them, as their being indifferent doesn’t necessarily make them emotionally inept, but their consideration for such images of pain

This is symbolised by Jaar in the form of the white light that opens his installation (which is also present in most of his work).

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and anguish will most probably end there. Empathy is a powerful catalyst for action, and we have become immune to it - unless, of course, a skinny Keira Knightley is suggesting we purchase Chanel’s Coco Madmoiselle perfume. “After a while you become numb, you just zone it out” Sergeant Davis (2007) recalls in an indolent, atonal voice, while talking about the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, later defined as a “sanitized house of torture” (Blasberg, Blasberg, 2005).

4.1

Abu Ghraib and Horror Gossip42 If one were to type the word ‘scandal’ in a Google search, the first results would

probably be related to a celebrity of some kind caught in an unexpected situation. One need only think of the endless examples of actresses and models caught on street wearing no make-up, cheap non-designer clothing, possibly grasping a fat-laden cheeseburger in one hand and a milkshake in the other. Gossip is outrageous in a bizarrely positive manner: it makes us feel all right about not being perfect emulations of the models so powerfully forced on us. It is a secretly savoured guilty pleasure: the observation of others’ faults makes us feel better about ourselves43. The outrage for famine, death and poverty (which makes us feel guilty about being more fortunate than others) has turned into outrage for the wrong type of shoes or the wrong dietary choice (which covertly gratifies us because we feel better-off). Snapshots that supposedly come from celebrities’ smartphones or hidden cameras leak into the Internet, end up on newspapers and into people’s conversations. We feel part of their pri-

41 In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag argues, “wherever people feel safe, they will be indifferent” (2003, p. 78). 42 I am not the first to associate Abu Ghraib with the word gossip: sickening as it may seem, one need only Google search “Abu Ghraib gossip” to find website over website featuring this notion associated to the crimes that occurred in the US occupied prison. 43 In Gossip and Scandal, Max Gluckman explains this as being a fundamental element in the development of societies as we know them and the way they function; Rebecca Feasey also brings this up in Reading heat: The meanings and pleasures of star fashions and celebrity gossip.

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vate lives, as though they no longer stand on golden pedestals of perfection and become normal people for a while, like us. Controlled by this attitude of personal satisfaction and content, we are most vulnerable to shock.

MaryOKate! Olsen! “caught”! in! normal! attire.! “Check! out! this! cute! homeless!girl.!Oh!wait,!that’s!MaryOKate!Olsen.!Going!for!the!“stuO dent”!look.!My!bad.”!(Stereogum,!2004)! !

Torture! victim! in! Abu! Ghraib! prison,! Baghdad,! Iraq! (2004).! PhotoO graph:!AP!

The Abu Ghraib images become even more powerful within this mind-set, because the scandal they generated happened through the same mechanism as gossip. To contextualise: the public was seeing rumour-laden photographs of Mary-Kate Olsen and Lindsay Lohan and was delving into their private affairs, searching for indecent stealthily

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captured snapshots, reading articles on them and feeling a little closer to them, a little more like them in their flaws. Then, utterly unexpected (to the public at least), came the appalling cell-phone photographs of naked, piled up bodies of men wearing nothing but black hoods, ropes tied around their ankles, wrists, or both, forced into atrociously uncomfortable positions, humiliated and tortured. Yet, as horrendous as the content of the image, is its cause: “The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken – with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives” (Sontag, 2004, p. 3)

There is something extremely disturbing and uncomfortable about looking at such an image, knowing that it was shot on a mobile phone. The closeness felt to such an amateur image was sickening: the thought ‘I could have taken that’ forced audiences to subconsciously identify with the images, to picture themselves holding the phone up for a moment, taking the snapshots, overwhelmed by revulsion.

A!detainee!with!a!hood!over!his!head!at!the!Abu!Ghraib!prisO on!in!Baghdad,!Iraq.!Photograph:!AP!

Soldiers were apparently unaware of there being anything wrong with what they were doing44: it was a sort of ‘Eichmann condition’ taking place all over again45. They

In The Photos Are Us, Sontag stresses that this very unawareness is the most terrifying aspect of the Abu Ghraib scandal (Sontag, 2004, p.3). 45 When Nazi general Adolf Eichmann was tried for his war crimes and asked how he and his associates could have possibly contributed to the mass murder of millions, he famously replied that it was “not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander.” (Arendt, 1976)

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were gradually allowed to believe such behaviors to be acceptable: comparing Abu Ghraib to the Milgram experiment, Zimbardo (2010) argues “all evil starts with 15 volts. And the next step is another 15 volts” 46. As soon as the incriminating photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were broadcast and made public however, soldiers realised the true extent of the atrocities they had committed.

May!20:!Specialist!Sabrina!Harman,!26,!grins!as!she!poses!alongside! the!corpse!of!an!Iraqi!detainee!in!Abu!Ghraib!prison.!ABC!News.!!

So on top of the content of these ghastly photographic trophies of war, it is also important to add that who made use of the medium and his or her relation to it (i.e. the intentions that motivated the user to employ the medium in the first place) are crucial elements to consider47. Intent and objectives are very important and powerful aspects in the mechanism of communication: the disturbing enjoyment soldiers experienced in taking the Abu Ghraib photographs were probably the most determining factors to how audienc-

Within the confined space of the prison, the limit between what was considered to be torture and legitimate techniques for interrogation was twisted and turned to such an extent that it was basically nullified, therefore enabling and causing the events that took place to escalate. 47 Referencing McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1964) to the amateur-ness of the images, one could argue that “the medium through which a message is sent to its receiver dictates the power of that message” (Laughey, 2007, p.35). So, really, the meaning created by Abu Ghraib photos is a combination of the image’s reinforcement and transgression of “both photographic conventions […] and social conventions […] employed in the ‘lived’ world” (Andén-Papadopolos, 2008, p. 8)

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es experienced their outrage towards them48. They no doubt raised awareness and outrage about the war and opened a window on the realities of what was actually happening in Iraq, however “there wasn’t really thoughtful reflection on exactly what happened” director Rory Kennedy (2007) explains in an interview regarding his documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Photojournalistic images are made to raise awareness and, most of the time, are backed and supported by the photographer’s intention to make change, to advocate the intervention of NGOs and relief programs; the Abu Ghraib photographs, in contrast, could be viewed as a ghastly and disturbing form of gossip49. Audiences united in reproach of soldiers’ behaviour, just as they had (much more casually) done in relation to the gossip about Mary-Kate Olsen’s eating disorder: “gossip and even scandal unite a group within a larger society, or against another group” (Gluckman, 1963, p. 313). As a result of audiences’ repulsion being caused just as much by the content of the images as by their distressing “context of production” (Lister and Wells, 2001, p. 68), their anger was mostly directed at the individual soldiers who committed the crimes and shot the photographs. ‘How could you have taken such a photograph?’ overrode ‘how could you have been allowed to torture that man?’, making it possible for Army superiors and administrations to lie low, unnoticed, amid the initial outbreak of horror and confusion caused by such depictions of sadistic brutality. The case was presented to the public as “a few bad soldiers whose misconduct was their own invention and not a part of any officially sanctioned method” (Mastroianni, 2013, p. 54). But then again, what of the greater picture?50

Andén-Papadopolos (2008, p. 9) argues, “the greater part of the information photographs carry resides not within their manifest contents, but in the way they communicate” 49 At the time of their creation, they were not at all meant for publication but for personal use, so when they leaked into the public’s gaze, their disclosure was naturally presented as a scandal. 50 Shocking as it may seem, “Rumsfeld kept his job; Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defence for intelligence and one of those most directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was still one of Rumsfeld's closest confidants.” (Hersh, 2005)

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“Even in a short-term perspective the Abu Ghraib photographs seem to have had minimal political or policy repercussions”, Andén-Papadopoulos (2008, p. 23) argues, but it nonetheless left the US Army’s reputation to deal with a gaping wound, “dealt a significant blow to the Unites States’ mission in Iraq” (ibidem) and “fanned the flames of resentment of America in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world” (Mastroianni, 2013, p. 54). The Abu Ghraib scandal had, to a degree, an impact on the course of history and of the war. Since the disclosure of the images in 2004, many have been the interpretations given to them and many accusations have been made to both superiors and soldiers alike, mostly verging on a Milgram-driven51 “bad-barrel” (ibidem) approach. They became an iconic turning point in the history of information, generated immense literary response and critique, but had no inherent drive to provoke audiences into action against war. The investigative journalists who unveiled them, not the authors of the images themselves, retrospectively gave that purpose to them.

4.2

Wikileaks, Flat Earth News and Investigative Journalism In Flat Earth News, a recently published work by investigative journalist Nick Da-

vies, contemporary straight journalism is displayed as “corrupted by an endemic failure to verify facts and stories” (Lanchester, 2008). It no longer has anything to do with delivering information so that readers can make informed decisions about their values and behaviours, but has rather turned into the manufacturing of products for mass consumption, greatly recycled from PR material or Press Association wire copy.

Not long after Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, Stanley Milgrim conducted some experiments on the psychological implications of the authority-obedience relation. His studies were later published in his book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974, London: Tavistock Publications). He also shot a black and white film of the experiment and its outcomes, Obedience (1962, Alexander Street Press [online] Available at: http://vasc.alexanderstreet.com/view/2122979 [Accessed: 23/11/13])

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In this sense, journalism has very much become what Adorno and Horkheimer had hypothesised with the Culture Industry. Journalists are no longer active participants in the divulgation of information, but alienated into an information-recycling mechanism, into an industrialised production line of text and images. This phenomenon is very much like what Lukács (1971) defined the ‘problem of reification’, according to which the intellectual and personal level of an individual is objectified and essentially forced into becoming a mere instrument, a piece of machinery within a greater apparatus. If viewed in light of this evaluation, gatekeeping (the practise by which information is filtered or ‘edited’) is effectively just a sophisticated alibi for censorship. “We should always see censorship, actually, as a very positive sign […] i.e. what people believe and think and feel and the words that they listen to, actually matters” Julian Assange (2012) hopefully points out during a recent conversation with Slavoj Žižek. Taking as an example the 2007 airstrike carried out by a US military helicopter52, which gratuitously killed a wounded Reuters employee, his rescuers and severely injured two small children53. Žižek (2012) argues that “you are being informed about this in such a way that basically you are able to ignore it […] this involves new modes of censorship”. Regarding how ideology currently functions within media communication systems, he points out that everybody knows that there are terrible things happening, it would be naïve to say otherwise, but to actively think and reflect upon them is not necessarily perceived as a priority. This is precisely why a platform such as the Wikileaks website is of fundamental importance, as “we may all know that the emperor is naked, but the moment somebody publically says ‘the emperor is naked’ everything changes” (Žižek, 2012).

52 53

Wikileaks released the video of the 2007 attack on 5th April 2010, on collateralmurder.com All information is from www.collateralmurder.com

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Just as the Abu Ghraib prison soldiers only realised they had committed terrible crimes once the images had been de-contextualised and divulged outside the confined space of the prison, Wikileaks forces on us a position in which unresponsiveness is not an option. It reveals information that is laterally known of but not directly recognised or acknowledged, in other words an intentional seeking out of other â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Abu Ghraibsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to force them into the mainstream. As far as information and news are concerned, it could be said that the new pioneers for the release of information are investigative journalists. Investigative journalism cross-examines, scrutinises and aims to uncover that which is not properly checked over or is untruthful in mainstream information media. At this point, one may question the role visual media and photography will play in the future context of information distribution. Could there be any such thing as an investigative photographer? Could it be possible to create visual material that reveals information in such a way that it is impossible to ignore? Are we just waiting for someone to find a way of photographing the naked emperor? This may perhaps turn out to be a dignified paparazzo of sorts, a new and original Oliviero Toscani54, or maybe just a photojournalist who accepts the need to find different and innovative ways of engaging audiences in the digital age of information.

His Benetton photojournalistic posters were quite the scandal at the time.

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5 Galleries of Horror “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close, and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection” (Burke, 1909, p. 42)

Paul!Hansen!(2012)!Gaza%Burial,!Gaza!City,!Palestinian!Territories.!2013!World!Press!Photo!of!the!Year,! Spot!News,!1st!prize!singles!

Straight, visual and non-visual journalism have become part of a great mechanism of fiction, alteration and advertising: on the one hand, forced to work under unforgivingly tight schedules, journalists are unable to look over or check the information they’re releasing to the public; on the other hand, audiences are too self-absorbed in psychologically simulated existences, too caught up in living up to the expectations established by the capitalist status quo to be concerned about acting on anything other than that55.

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been com-

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Nevertheless, photography still stubbornly clings on to its journalistic history: the World Press Agency still rewards and celebrates photographers who report pain, agony and conflict. However, as photojournalism gets more and more gruesome, the point photographers are trying to make seems to get lost in the atrociousness of the image: the photojournalistic practice has reached a point where ferocity and grisliness seem to have become more important than conveying any incentive for remedying action or intervention. Gore has become a fetish, and photojournalism a sort of “pornographic” (Tait, 2008) recording of violence simply for the sake of it, to satisfy the desire for knowledge, or perhaps to “make oneself more numb” (Sontag, 2003); Edmund Burke was the first who theorised the thrilling and terrifying sentiment taken from observing the morbid, and defined it the “sublime” (1909). In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag observes that the desire to see images of dead and mutilated bodies is almost perversely relatable to the desire of seeing naked bodies: “once moderated, the sublime could transform itself not into pleasure, exactly, but into a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror” (Ohlin, 2002, p. 23). The realism in such depictions of pain has deteriorated from being an effective tool for the reinforcement of empathy, and has gradually become a matter of style, of “surface appearance” over content (Taylor, 2007 p. 42). Perhaps the solution to this numbing against content can only come from accepting the importance of style, appearances and aesthetics, embracing these tools and using them against themselves. “It's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it” (Burtynsky, 2005).

municated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.” (Sontag, 2004, p. 79)

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5.1

Tactical Beauty: Sublime or Sublimated?

Simon! Norfolk! (2003)! BulletOscarred! apartment! building! and! shops!in!the!Karte!Char!district!of!Kabul.!This!area!saw!fighting! between! Hikmetyar! and! Rabbani! and! then! between! Rabbani! and!the!Hazaras.!

Caspar! David! Friedrich! (1825)! The% Cemetery%Entrance"

Simon Norfolk’s famously beautiful photographs of devastated, war-scarred landscapes enthrall gallery visitors and Internet browsers into an ongoing dialogue. On the one hand, the bleak and gloomy shades of rubble and ruins evoke a sort of melancholy feeling of desolation; yet they are juxtaposed by small hopeful tinges of more vibrant colors, such as the balloons in the teahouse photograph, or the sky above the bulletscarred apartments in Kabul. The overall ensemble is a romantically composed melancholy image, very much like a Caspar D. Friedrich painting. “By making the pictures very beautiful you’re almost tricked into coming inside that photograph’s space for a while. […] So beauty has always been a kind of tactical thing for me” (Norfolk, 2011) There is an ongoing dialectic between the beautiful colors and harmonious composition, and the dramatic content of the photographs. Beauty and aesthetics become a sort of trap: audiences are so used to looking at attractive images, so used to selecting visual ma-

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terial on the sole grounds of aesthetic gratification, that they are attracted to Norfolk’s photographs like moths to a lamp.

Simon! Norfolk! (2003)! Former! teahouse! in! a! park! next! to! the! Afghan! Exhibition! of! Economic! and! Social! Achievements!in!the!Shah!Shahid!district!of!Kabul.!Balloons!were!illegal!under!the!Taliban,!but!now!balloonO sellers!are!common!on!the!streets!of!Kabul!providing!cheap!treats!for!children.!

Once spectators have been drawn into the images however, by reading the caption they’ll most probably realize that there is nothing beautiful about them at all. The former teahouse behind the man holding a colorful array of balloons no longer looks like some sort of scenic ethereal construction, but starts to look more like the wreckage it truly is. The debris dangling off it starts to look ghostly and sinister, rather than picturesque; the man turns into a tragically ironic figure, his disheveled clothing and tired posture almost unbearably evident against the colorful balloons he’s holding, which instantly look harsh and unnerving. Photographer Edward Burtynsky also employs the expedient of beauty to enchant and grasp hold of his spectators’ attention. More in the style of William Turner’s portrayal of the sublime, and more concerned with environmental issues, he portrays majestic, human-scarred landscapes.

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Edward!Burtynsky!(2011)!Colorado%River%Delta%#2,!Near! San!Felipe,!Baja,!Mexico"

Edward!Burtynsky!(2001)!Shipbreaking%#49," Chittagong,!Bangladesh!

The “industrial sublime,” “the toxic sublime,” the “beauty in the beast,” “paradoxical beauty,” “awesome ambiguity,” landscapes that are “blighted and beautiful” are some of the dichotomies used to define Burtynsky’s photography (Pagel, 2012). Once again, the oxymoron of such terrible subject matter being so beautifully depicted is the cause for audiences’ fascination for the images. Once again, the photographer openly intends to spur thought and reflection: “these images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear” (Burtynsky, 2013). Photo Democracy’s review of the Water exhibition regards it as a successful incentive for reflection, which by creating a “new dimension” for viewers to “question their own role within the viewing experience” (Fison, 2013), compiles a misleadingly beautiful collection of images and aspires to enlighten audiences on the uses and misuses of the planet’s water sources. Be that as it may, some still argue that it rather just seems to verge on being a series of very beautiful, picturesquely sublime images where ethical issues “collapse into good old fashioned awe” (Carey-Kent, 2013).

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Joseph!Mallord!William!Turner!(exhibited!1842)!Snow% Storm%@%Steam@Boat%off%a%Harbour's%Mouth!!

Edward!Burtynsky!(2011)!Xiaoling%Dam%#2,%Yellow%River,% Henan%Province,%China!

In effect, when entering the gallery space at Burtynsky’s Water exhibition56, what firstly comes to mind is how stunningly magnificent the prints are, striking in the way they each so colourfully fill such a large portion of wall space. Geometry, composition, colours and sheer size make the experience a primarily aesthetic one, with no accompanying text if not for the small captions indicating the location where the photographs were shot. Admittedly, it could be argued that the accompanying book for Water contains extensive information on the subjects and by no means takes the gravity of the misuse and waste of the planet’s water sources for granted. Yet one must find, open and read it to extensively understand the true scope of Burtynsky’s research on the matter: he might not seek to “preach” (Carey-Kent, 2013), but the message he is conveying by purely visual means is definitely not of the strongest or the most direct. Perhaps excessively abstracted and conceptualised by the aura given to it by the gallery space, Water has itself become the beauty expedient, the spectacle, in a sort of Gautierian ‘l’art pour l’art’ manner57.

I visited the exhibition when it was held at London’s Flowers Gallery, 21 Cork Street. Surely the most renowned figure to use the slogan ‘L’art pour l’art’ (‘art for art’s sake’) for the first time, Théophile Gautier was a French Romantic poet and writer. His work influenced celebrated literary figures such as Oscar Wilde, Proust and Charles Baudelaire. 57

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Andreas!Gursky,!(1999)!Board%of%Trade%II,!Chicago!

Much like Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky is also known for creating stunning photographic imagery with nonfigurative, pictorial qualities58. His “intensely colourful, and wonderfully composed” photographs (Ohlin, 2002, p.23) abstract human presence to a mere mass of confused figures or simply removes it, leaving audiences with an “uneasy feeling” (ibidem) of estrangement and confusion: the “hive-like” (Ollman, 2010) Board of Trade II image clearly exemplifies this. Again, one must question the bond between the aesthetic manifestation and “ambiguous intent and meaning” (Stonard, 2009) the photographer bestows on his work. The context of viewing is very important to the reaction it generates: the gallery space creates an environment in which one can concentrate, it gives viewers enough psychological breathing space for them to reflect upon what they are looking at. But most importantly, the gallery space creates expectations; it “adds an aura of seriousness, of intellectual or aesthetic intent to the picture” (Lister, Wells, 2001, p. 65). Sebastião Salgado’s most recent photographic collection Genesis, exhibited in some of the most prestigious venues worldwide, is an interesting example to consider in relation to this. The majestic black and white prints of idyllic, untouched landscapes and of native com-

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munities, untarnished by technologies and industry make the air heavy, the silence sombre, and leave no space for nonchalance; exhibition visitors become enveloped in a silent, auratic, almost worshipful feel of reverie within the custom-built structure of Genesis. Salgado presents tribes and landscapes from “the world as it was” (Salgado, 2013), glorifying and highlighting the importance of the natural environment and the preservation of untouched lands, however different or bizarre they may seem to us as Westerners: he wants us to be more like them, to return to an untouched and “unspoiled” (ibidem) existence. His admirable intentions are clear and he has no reserves in wholeheartedly declaring them59, yet the imposing and almost solemn atmosphere created by the gallery structure is overwhelming to spectators in the same way as Burtynsky’s Water is. Praiseworthy as his ambitions are, he tends to be dangerously one-sided in a way that impedes audiences' understanding of the optimism, enthusiasm to make change, and passion he bestows upon his work. Once again, audiences fall into a state of fatigued helplessness in the wake of a “biblical” (Cumming, 2013), “dramatic and powerful” (Bryce, 2013) collection of images, which leave no room for objection. “It is a visual tribute to a fragile planet that we all have a duty to protect” Lélia Wanick Salgado (2013) states in the exhibition’s opening wall text, but “who are the we” (Sontag, 2003) to whom these duties belong? Salgado fervently demands a reaction from his audience, making it a moral obligation to respond, but also gives the slight impression that anyone ignoring these responsibilities may be a morally incorrect, ruthless and careless individual, who pollutes the planet, and obliviously contributes to its destruction.

“I’m a bit jealous of painting, where you have surface and the smell of paint. In my case, it is always the same,” he admitted to a Canadian Art reporter in 2009 (Moffat, 2012) 59 In The Silent Drama of Photography, his 2013 TED talk about Genesis, Salgado fervently advocates the need for concern about reforesting the planet, “we must rebuild these forests. That is the essence of our life, these forests” he states, “We need to breathe”.

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Sebasti達o!Salgado!(2005)!Upper%Xingu%Indians,!Brazil!

Sebastiao!Salgado!(2010)!Buffalo,!Kafue!National!Park,!Zambia!!

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The slightly terrifying but controversially beautifully depicted concepts of extinction, global warming and cultural disappearance approach the pictographic and symbolic themes of sublime beauty with the same attitude as Romantic painters from the mid 1800s: they are “conversant about terrible objects” (Burke, 1909, p. 36) but do not necessarily represent more than a “forbidden pleasure” (Burtynsky, 2005). They’re something to be thrillingly scared of from the comfort of an observatory position (be it in a gallery or behind a laptop or television screen). What Burtynsky words the “dilemma of our modern existence” (2013) is in fact this discourse between attraction and revulsion, fear and fascination. We interrogate our role as observers when involvement is so desperately sought after, but are held back by our reluctance to abandon the comforts and securities we have come to value so dearly.

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6 Conclusion “I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious, for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below.” (Poe, 1965, p.137) Photojournalism has deteriorated into a sort of grim pornography of pain and horror (Tait, 2008), where the aesthetics of the photographic medium have replaced its content60. Audiences inexorably keep drifting into an unsettled slumber, the growing darkness they are enveloped by dappled in weak cries for help, camouflaged in beautiful images. The distress caused by terrible facts and pictures turns into a thrilling shiver of uncomfortable allure, a bit like getting onto a rollercoaster at a theme park: you know you’ll get off, you know you’ll be safe afterwards. While a safe place to return to remains, in spite of it being vacuous simulation, action and reaction will remain distant, strenuous endeavours. Out of all human undertakings, action is the only one that necessarily requires cooperation to exist: without the “constant presence of others” (Arendt, 1976, p. 23), action cannot happen. While we are seemingly living united, but only in our separateness (Debord, 1998), action will repeatedly be sought after but will never be achieved; and with the inability to act comes the loss of compassion (Sontag, 2003) and “compassion fatigue” (Moeller, 2003). “While we have become excellent in the labouring we perform in public, our capacity for action and speech has lost much of its former quality since the rise of the social realm banished these into the sphere of the intimate and the private.” (Arendt, 1976, p. 49) Nevertheless, Wikileaks and Flat Earth News have proven that action has happened, and that it keeps on happening. The uproar caused by Abu Ghraib proved that audiences can still be moved and can still be affected by information. To restore the validity of their

“It is a medium without a message, as it were” (McLuhan, 1964, 23)

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practice, photographers, artist, writers and all creatives alike must persevere, they must cooperate and become activists: not only must the spectacle be confronted, it must also be suffocated61. As a matter of fact there are many supporters and advocates of this new wave of (re)active practice already: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, writer Arundhati Roy, journalist Naomi Klein, artists Ai Wei Wei and Alfredo Jaar, musician Ani DiFranco, the Centre for Artistic Activism, the Social and Public Art Resource Centre (SPARC), and PhotoPhilantrophy.org are only a few varied examples62.

Alfredo!Jaar!(2000)!Signs%of%Light,%The%Rwanda%Project%1994@2000!

By uniting the techniques employed by investigative journalism and the aesthetic tactics put to use by photographers such as Norfolk, Burtynsky, Gursky and Salgado, in the awe-inspiring and concentration-enabling environment of the gallery space, the solution to apathy may be on its way. However indifferent, conditioned and unsympathetic audiences may seem, and however human and unavoidable these traits may be, so are relentlessness, hope and determination. As in all conditions of repression and subjugation, the burst of upheaval and change is only a matter of time, and it starts with awareness (along with a slight initial discomfort).

â&#x20AC;&#x153;To deprive it of oxygen, to shame it, to mock it with our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we are being brainwashed to believe.â&#x20AC;? Arundhati Roy ardently insists at the World Social Forum in Porto Allegre in 2003

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Ai!Wei!Wei!(1995!â&#x20AC;&#x201C;!2003)!Study%of%Perspective%â&#x20AC;&#x201C;%Tiananmen%Square%

An extensive list of resources on the topic of art activism can be found at http://culturalpolitics.net/social_movements/art

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7 Bibliography 7.1

Literary References

Adorno, T., Anson, G. (1975) Culture Industry Reconsidered, in New German Critique, No. 6, pp. 12-19 [online] Autumn, 1975. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487650 [Accessed: 22/11/13] Adorno, T. W., Horkheimer, M. (1979) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, London Arendt, H. (1976) Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Revised and enlarged ed, Penguin, Harmondsworth Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York Barker, C. (2013) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 4th Edition, Sage, London BBC (2013) 1976: Soweto protest turns violent, in BBC: On This Day [online] Available at: news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/16/newsid_2514000/2514467.stm [Accessed: 18/12/13] Berger, J. (1979) Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex, England Blasberg, M., Blasberg, A. (2005) The Prisoner and the Guard: A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib, Spiegel [article online] September 26, 2005. Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-prisoner-and-the-guard-a-tale-of-twolives-destroyed-by-abu-ghraib-a-377361-2.html [Accessed: 06/11/13] Blocker, J. (2009) Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Bryce, A. (2013) Exhibition review: SebastiĂŁo Salgado â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Genesis at the Natural History Museum [article online] Available at: http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2013/04/09/exhibition-review-sebastiao-salgadogenesis-at-the-natural-history-museum/ [Accessed: 07/01/14] Burgin, V. ed (1982) Thinking Photography, MacMillan Press, London Burke, E. (1909) On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, On the French Revolution, Collier, New York Burke, E. (1909-90) A Philosophical Enquiry, edited with an introduction by Philips, A., Oxford University Press, Oxford Carey-Kent, P. (2013) Water / Reviewed by Paul Carey-Kent [article online] Available at: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/11/edward-burtynsky-water/ [Accessed: 06/01/14]

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Cartwright, L., Sturken, M. (2001), Practices of Looking: an Introduction to Visual Culture, University Press, Oxford Chaon, A. (2007) Who Failed in Rwanda, Journalists or the Media? in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, edited by Thompson, A., Pluto Press, London, pp. 160-66 Cubitt, S. (2001) Simulation and Social Theory, Sage Publications Ltd, London Dalgleich, T. (2004) The Emotional Brain, in Neuroscience: Nature Reviews, Vol. 5, pp.582-589, July 2004 Davies, N. (2008) Flat Earth News, Chatto & Windus, London Debord, G. (1998) Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York Doyle, M. (2003) Ghosts of Rwanda: Interview with Mark Doyle, in Frontline [online] Available at: pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/interviews/doyle.html [Accessed on 18/12/13] Esposito, S. A., (2012) Abu Ghraib After the Scandal: A Firsthand Account of the 344th Combat Support Hospital, 2005-2006, McFarland & Company, North Carolina Feasey, R. (2008) Reading heat: The meanings and pleasures of star fashions and celebrity gossip, in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 22:5, pp. 687-699 [online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304310802227947 [Accessed on 04/01/14] Featherstone, M. (2007) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism: Second Edition, Sage Publications UK, London Fison, L. (2013) REVIEW â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Edward Burtynsky: Water [online article] Available at: http://www.photodemocracy.com/blog-admin/?p=297 [Accessed: 06/01/14] French, C. (2006) Alfredo Jaar, a conversation with [online http://www.alfredojaar.net/press/camera_austria/austria01.html [Accessed 08/01/14] Fukuyama, F. (1989) The End of History? The National Interest, Summer 1989 Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge Giles, T. (2004) Media Failure over Rwandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Genocide [online] Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3599423.stm [Accessed on: 18/12/13] Gluckman, M. (1963) Papers in Honor of Melville J. Herskovits: Gossip and Scandal, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, No. 3, June 1963, pp. 307-316, The University of Chicago Press [online] Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739613 [Accessed on: 04/01/14] Goffman, E. (1990) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, England

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Hancock, P., Hughes, B., Jagger, E., Paterson, K., Russell, R., Tulle-Winton, E., Tyler, M. (2000) The Body, Culture and Society: An Introduction, Open University Press, Buckingham/Philadelphia Hellomagazine (2003) Retouching is ‘excessive’ says slimline covergirl Kate Winslet, in Hellomagazine.com, January 10th 2003 [online] Available at: http://www.hellomagazine.com/film/2003/01/10/katewinslet/ [Accessed on: 03/01/14] Hersh, S. (2005) Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Harper Perennial, New York and London Hurley, S. (1998) Consciousness in Action, Harvard University Press, London Jaar, A. (1994) The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000 [online] Available at: http://www.alfredojaar.net/rwanda_web/95newsweek/newsweek.html [Accessed: 10/01/14] Jacobson, C. [ed] (2002) Underexposed, Vision On, London Kennedy, R. (2007) Rory Kennedy and 'The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib'. Interviewed by Michael Fox [in person] Cowell foyer, February 19, 2007. Transcript available at: http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=7125 [Accessed on: 04/03/14] Kretchmer, S. B. (2004) Advertainment, in Journal of Promotion, Management, 10:1-2, 37-54, [online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J057v10n01_04 [Accessed: 17/12/13] Kuperman, A. (2000) Rwanda in Retrospect: Could the Genocide Have Been Stopped? In Foreign Affairs, January/February: 94–5 Lanchester, J. (2008) Riots, Terrorism etc, in London Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 3-5 (March 2008) Laughey, D. (2007) Key Themes In Media Theory, Open University Press, England Lister, M., Wells, L. (2001) Seeing Beyond Belief: Cultural Studies as an Approach to Analysing the Visual, in Van Leeuwen, T., Jewitt, C. Handbook of Visual Analysis, pp. 61-91, Sage, London Luhmann, N. (2000) Art as a Social System, trans. Knodt, E., Stanford University Press, Stanford Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Merlin Press Ltd, Great Britain McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Moeller, H. (2006) Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois

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Moeller, S. (2003) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death, Routledge, New York and London Moffat, I. (2012) Review: Andreas Gursky, Gagosian Gallery, in frieze, Issue 4, Spring 2012 [online article] Available at: http://frieze-magazin.de/archiv/kritik/andreasgursky/?lang=en [Accessed: 07/01/14] Nathan, C. (2011) Will Kate Winslet's Anti-Cosmetic Surgery League catch on? [article online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-withjane-martinson/2011/aug/23/kate-winslet-anti-cosmetic-surgery [Accessed: 08/01/14] Nieman Foundation (2004) Reporting on War and Terror, Special Issue, Summer 2004, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University [online] Available at: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/assets/pdf/Nieman%20Reports/backissues/war_and_t error.pdf [Accessed: 04/01/14] Nordenstreng, K., Hannikainen, L. (1984) The Mass Media Declaration of UNESCO, Ablex Publishing, Norwood Ohlin, A. (2002) Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime, in Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 22-35 [online article] Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778148 [Accessed: 20/11/2013] Ollman, L. (2010) Art review: Andreas Gursky at Gagosian Gallery [article online] Available at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/art-reviewandreas-gursky-at-gagosian-gallery.html [Accessed: 07/01/14] Pagel, A. (2012) Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime, in Gordon Contemporary artists Project Gallery Card [online] Available at: http://fristdownloads.s3.amazonaws.com/4080/burtynsky_gallery_card.pdf [Accessed: 06/01/14] Peace Pledge Union Information (2013) Talking about genocide â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Genocides / Rwanda 1994 [online source] Available at: http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_rwanda.html [Accessed: 05/01/14] Pepperell, R. (2009) An Information Sublime: Knowledge after The Postmodern Condition, in Leonardo, Vol. 42, No. 5, p384, 2009. Peress, G. (1997) Giles Peress, interviewed by Carole Kismaric, in BOMB 59, Spring 1997, ART Peress, G. (1995) The Silence, Scalo, New York Poe, E. A. (1965) A Descent into the MaelstrĂśm, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Books, St Ives Protevi, J. (2009) Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Salgado, L., Salgado, S. (2013) Genesis, Taschen, Cologne

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Smith, R. (2009) One Image of Agony Resonates Two Lives [article online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/arts/design/15jaar.html [Accessed: 10/01/14] Solomon-Godeau, A. (2003) Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Sontag, S. (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin Books, London Sontag, S. (2004) ‘The photos are us’, Susan Sontag on the real meaning of the Abu Ghraib pictures, The Guardian: G2, May 24, 2004, pp. 3-5 Spencer, G. (2008) The Media and Peace: from Vietnam to the ‘War on Terror’, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke Stafford, B., M. (2007) Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, The University of Chicago Press, London Stallabrass, J. [ed] (2013) Documentary, Whitechapel Gallery, London, MIT Press, Cambridge Stallabrass, J. (1996) Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London Stallabrass, J. (2013) Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, Photoworks, Brighton Stereogum (2004) Less Rock More Starlets [online] 24th September 2004, Available at: http://www.stereogum.com/916/less_rock_more_starlets/news/ [Accessed: 03/01/14] Stonard, J. (2009) Gursky, Andreas (Biography) [online] Available at: http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096527?goto=gurskyan dreas&type=biography&pos=1 [Accessed: 07/01/14] Tait, S. (2008) Pornographies of Violence? Internet Spectatorship on Body Horror, in Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25:1, pp. 91-111 [online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295030701851148 [Accessed: 06/01/14] Taylor, J. (2007) Iraqi torture photographs and documentary realism in the press, in Journalism Studies, 6:1, pp. 39-49 [online] Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461670052000328195 [Accessed: 06/01/14] Turner, B. (2000) The Body in Western Society: Social Theory and its Perspectives, in Religion and the Body, ed. Coakley, S., Cambridge University Press Väliaho, P. (2012) Affectivity, Biopolitics and the Virtual Reality of War, in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp.63-83, SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore Viva.org.uk (2010) 'Cruelty and Filth' Exposed at the Happy Egg Company [online] Available at: http://www.viva.org.uk/what-we-do/about-us/media-centre/mediareleases/cruelty-and-filth-exposed-happy-egg-company [Accessed on: 20/12/13]

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7.2

Audio-visual References

BBC Newsnight (2013) Hunger Games Jennifer Lawrence talks body image. [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3HU7e1XrYA [Accessed: 08/01/14] Burtynsky, E. (2005) Edward Burtynsky: My wish: Manufactured landscapes and green education [video online] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_on_manufactured_landscapes.html [Accessed: 14/11/13] Christakis, N. (2010) Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks. [video online] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networ ks.html [Accessed: 11/12/13] FrontlineClubLondon (2012) Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Žižek moderated by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Xm08uTSDQ [Accessed on: 23/11/13] jesusdmjerez (2012) Arundhati Roy at the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2003 [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu3t8Z-kavA [Accessed 07/01/14] Kennedy, R. dir., Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, 2007. [Documentary] USA: HBO Documentary Films. Lui, E. (2013) The Sociology of Gossip: Elaine Lui at TEDxVancouver. [video online] Available at: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Sociology-of-Gossip-Elaine [Accessed: 05/01/14] Nachtwey, J. (2007) James Nachtwey: My wish: Let my photographs bear witness. [video online] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war.html [Accessed: 11/10/13] Norfolk, S. (2011) Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk [video online] Available at: http://bcove.me/1sya33l9 [Accessed: 14/11/13] Salgado, S. (2013) Sebastião Salgado: The silent drama of photography [video online] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastiao_salgado_the_silent_drama_of_photography.html [Accessed: 06/01/14]

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University of California Television (UCTV) (2008) Conversations with History: Gilles Peress [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdJZGd21rZY [Accessed: 09/01/14] University of California Television (UCTV) (2008) Sebastiao Salgado: The Photographer as Activist [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6fRykp6nRQ [Accessed: 07/01/14] Zimbardo, P. (2008) Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil [video online] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html [Accessed: 05/01/14]

7.3

Illustrations

Andrade, P. (2009) [photo online] In the Sound of Silence gallery installation, visitors enter a large enclosure to view a film, The New York Times [online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/04/15/arts/15jaar_CA1.ready.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] AP, Picture 17: May 20, Specialist Sabrina Harman, 26, grins as she poses alongside the corpse of an Iraqi detainee in Abu Ghraib prison. [photo online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/pictures/image/0,8543,-13004919007,00.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] AP, Picture 22: Abu Ghraib, photograph published in Washington Post on May 21 2004. [photo online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/pictures/image/0,8543,13604919007,00.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] AP, An image showing a detainee with a hood over his head in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq. AP [photo online] Available at: http://static.guim.co.uk/sysimages/Observer/Columnist/Columnists/2011/3/5/1299350554971/ABU-GHRAIBPRISON-001.jpg [Accessed: 13/01/14] Burtynsky, E. (2011) [photograph] Colorado River Delta #2, Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/) Burtynsky, E. (2001) [photograph] Shipbreaking #49, Chittagong, Bangladesh (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/)

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Burtynsky, E. (2011) [photograph] Xiaoling Dam #2, Yellow River, Henan Province, China (http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/) Carter, K. (1993) [photo online] A vulture watches a starving child during famine in Sudan, Megan Patricia Carter Trust, Sygma — Corbis; above, some of the text of Alfredo Jaar’s work, which is based on the photo [online] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/04/15/arts/15jaar_CA0.ready.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] Friedrich, C. D. (1825) [painting] The Cemetery Entrance (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany) Gursky, A. (1999) [photograph] Board of Trade II, Chicago (Monika Sprueth Galerie, Koeln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2005) GQ (February 2003) cover image [online] Available at: http://www.magforum.com/glion/gq_2003feb_winslet_digital.jpg [Accessed: 13/01/14] Hansen, P. (2012) [photograph] Gaza Burial, Gaza City, Palestinian Territories [online] Available at: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/awards/2013/spot-news/paul-hansen [Accessed: 13/01/14] Jaar, A. (2002) Lament of the Images [photo online] Available at: http://www.marthagarzon.com/contemporary_art/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/JaarLament-of-the-Images-2002.jpg [Accessed: 13/01/14] Jaar, A. (2000) [photo online] Signs of Light, The Rwanda Project 1994-2000 [online] Available at: http://www.alfredojaar.net/index1.html (The Rwanda Project, 2000) [Accessed: 13/01/14] Jaar, A. (1994) The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000 [online] Available at: http://www.alfredojaar.net/rwanda_web/95newsweek/newsweek.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] Jaar, A. (2006) [photo online] The Sound of Silence displayed at at Unlimited, Art Basel is displayed on June 10, 2013 in Basel, Switzerland.. Getty Images [online] Available at: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/alfredo-jaars-the-sound-of-silence-atunlimited-art-basel-news-photo/170287966 [Accessed: 13/01/14]

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Kruger, B. (1987) Untitled (I shop therefore I am), photographic silkscreen/vinyl [online] Available at: http://www.maryboonegallery.com/artist_info/pages/kruger/detail1.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] Lloyd, M. (2012) [photo online] Occupy London protesters outside St Paul's Cathedral before the eviction. Getty Images [online] Available at: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/anti-capitalist-protestors-from-theoccupy-lsx-movement-at-news-photo/139498505 [Accessed: 13/01/14] Nachtwey, J. (1994) [photograph] Survivor of Hutu death camp., Rwanda (http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/) Neal, L. (2011) [photo online] Julian Assange speaking to protesters from the steps of St Paul's cathedral. AFP/Getty Images[online] Available at: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/wikileaks-founder-julian-assangespeaks-to-demonstrators-news-photo/140118477 [Accessed: 13/01/14] Norfolk, S. (2003) [photograph] Former teahouse in a park next to the Afghan Exhibition of Economic and Social Achievements in the Shah Shahid district of Kabul (http://www.simonnorfolk.com) Norfolk, S. (2003) [photograph} Bullet-scarred apartment building and shops in the Karte Char district of Kabul (http://www.simonnorfolk.com) Nzima, S. (1976) 16th June, [photograph] Mbuyiso Makhubo carrying Hector Pieterson and his sister, Antoinette, running alongside [online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN0000.jpg.html [Accessed: 13/01/14] Parr, M. and friends (2005) [online scan] Road Trip, published by Sony Ericsson. Designed by Mind Design, London. Printed by Druckerei Wiesendanger, Murnau, Germany. Softback. w 200 x h 165 mm (http://www.martinparr.com/books/) Peress, G. (1994) [photograph] Photographer James Nachtwey, covering the Rwandan civil war, carries a baby girl orphaned by the massacres there to a shelter, Zaire (http://www.magnumphotos.com) Peress, G. (1995) [photocopied] The Silence, Scalo, Zurich. Softcover, first edition, front and back covers. Peress, G. (1995) [photocopied] The Silence, Scalo, Zurich. Softcover, first edition. Opening and closing photographs.

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Salgado, S. (2010) [photograph] Buffalo, Kafue National Park, Zambia (http://www.amazonasimages.com/) Salgado, S. (2005) [photograph] Upper Xingu Indians, Brazil (http://www.amazonasimages.com/) Stereogum (2004) [photos online] Check out this cute homeless girl. Oh wait, that’s MaryKate Olsen. Going for the “student” look. My bad. Available at: http://cdn.stereogum.com/img/studentolsen.jpg [Accessed: 13/01/14] Thielker, K. (1994) [photograph] Refugees carrying water containers make their way back to their huts at the Benaco Refugee Camp in Tanzania near the Rwandan border in May 1994 (http://www.karstenthielker.de/) Turner, J. M. W. (1842) [painting] Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (Tate Britain, London, UK) Unknown artist, My thoughts have been replaced by moving images (detourned comic) [online] Available at: http://www.notbored.org/my-thoughts.gif [Accessed: 13/01/14] Vogue (November 20130 cover image [online] Available at: http://static.guim.co.uk/sysimages/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/15/1381873870653/katewinsletvogue496x620.jpg [Accessed: 13/01/14] Wei Wei, A. (1995 – 2003) [photograph] Study of Perspective – Tiananmen Square (Photography Council and the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art) Williams, G., South Photos, Africa Media Online (1976) Anti apartheid poster, struggle days, June 16 (now Youth Day) Hector Petersen museum [online] Available at: http://www.africamediaonline.com/search/preview/107_363 [Accessed: 13/01/14]

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