New Errol Morris Book on Photography
I’m very excited to read the new Errol Morris book Believing is Seeing. It’s based on a series of posts Morris did for a New York Times blog. I have read a number of the posts, which were fascinating and exhaustive, and as a Times book reviewer noted, lie “just to the pleasurable side of tedium.” Morris is interested in quite simply (and broadly)
… the relationship between photographs and reality.
In his blog posts, and now the book, Morris dissects various photographs, most of which are iconic, trying to debunk common perceptions or myths about them. In the process I was reminded that our current disrespect, or even disgust, at “photoshopping” ostensibly documentary photos is perhaps unfairly singular; ALL photos are edited in some way or another, and this is true from the time of the very first photos back in the 1800s. When a photo is taken the choice about what to keep in the frame and what to keep out, when to shoot the photo, which photo of a series to publish or make public, cropping, lighting, developing, all have significant effects, in many cases just as influential (if not more so) than digital retouching, on the final photo we see. Photos are, of course, most definitely not reality. And their danger is that they often so convincingly seem to be.
More and more, we are living in a world of photographs and video. Most of the events we experience today are not “live” and in person but mediated through these images. (And even when we are experiencing events live, in person, we often are recording them at the same time anyway, which alters the experience.) Morris’s deep explorations into the complexities and distortions of photographs is an important primer to help train us to be more critical of the images that dominant our perceptions, indeed our experience of life today.
performance art in the age of YouTube
There’s a great article/discussion in the Times inspired by the recent Ocularpation: Wall Street, a street “protest” featuring naked people as a metaphor for the lack of transparency in our financial institutions. The act itself wasn’t particularly interesting, but it is a great launching point for broaching the broader context of performance art in the digital age. And for that matter, not just performance art, but the value of live experience versus “mediated” experience. In the piece James Westcott hit the nail on the head when he noted:
The ubiquity of digital spectacles and curiosities today is one reason performance art has had its thunder stolen. Another is more insidious — a new form of subjectivity prompted by platforms like Facebook: the constant need to Perform Yourself (which could be YouTube’s slogan, rather than “Broadcast Yourself”). It’s not surprising, then, that many people were blasé about the nudity on Wall Street.
Indeed, while our online selves can function as augmentations of our not-online selves, I’d argue they also function as separate entities entirely, crafted and updated as a result of a hyper-self-awareness that generally far exceeds our degree of self-awareness in our not-online lives.
I’m going to quote his next thoughts at length because, again, they are spot on:
Marina Abramovic’s incredibly popular three-month performance at the Museum of Modern Art last year — where people sat and looked her in the eye for as long as they could take it — seemed to mark a crucial transition from the physical to the virtual in performance art.
In the flesh, the pure presence and catharsis of agenda-less eye contact (causing many of the 1,400 sitters to break down in tears) became, online, an exercise in obsessivecataloging and celebrity-spotting. Whereas the performance itself opened up vertiginous depths of empathy, the online experience was addictive and alienating.
Through the alchemy of the Internet, the performance loses some of its luster. From gazing to gawking, total immersion to idle browsing, the level of engagement is no longer the same. But at least more people could engage with it than the few who are part of the art world.
There were three other commenters who all touched on the notion of the value of live events or art, where multiple senses are engaged in a way that the internet is not capable of doing.
I recently interviewed street artist Gaia (excerpts will be posted soon on this site) and he discussed many of these same issues in how they relate to street art. Namely, I prodded him to explain how the knowledge that he will be posting images of his art on the web immediately after he creates it on the street affects his creative process, and the experience for the viewer of his art online versus the viewer on the street.
As technologically mediated* experience becomes more and more the norm, rather than live direct experience, the myriad ways, both nuanced and blatant, that we are affected is a source of increasing fascination for me.
*Disclaimer for academics and semantics police: Yes, all experience is technically “mediated.” When I refer to mediated or unmediated experience I generally mean the difference between experience that is either direct between two or more people in the live vicinity of each other or direct between a person and the natural environment, versus experience that solely occurs through, or that is augmented/influenced by, (hi)tech electronic equipment such as smart phones that connect us with the Internet and others, take photos and video, etc., and even (lower)tech media like newspapers, magazines.
