Dennis Dunleavy

Culture Shift

While futurists were gathering in Washington, D.C. last week for a symposium sponsored by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board  on what’s next in the world of computer science and sociological change, an Italian imaging company Hal9000  released the largest digital photographic image ever recorded. The 8.6-gigabyte image – that’s 8.6 billion 0s and1s in a photographic frame – is not only a milestone it also indicates the speed in which cultural information now flows. 

 

Composed of more than 1145 by 12.2 megapixel images, the giant image of Guadenzio Ferrari’s 1513 mural “Parete Guadenziana” pushes the optical boundaries of an informational/representational system that inhabits us. 

Back in Washington scientists from an array of media-technology firms debated how technology is increasingly becoming more powerful and more pervasive. But the “science” there is another discussion underway. What lies beneath and beyond the tools and techniques people use to make things cheaper, faster, and easier?

Washington Post writer, Steve Lohr suggests:

“Future trends in computer imaging and storage will make it possible for a person, wearing a tiny digital device with a microphone and camera, to essentially record his or her life. The potential for communication, media and personal enrichment is striking.”

In terms of photojournalism, the larger conversation educators and professionals must engage in needs to include how humankind copes and adapts to the seemingly relentless challenges placed on its critical role within an informational system. Unfortunately, photojournalism, as an occupational group, has a history that has been to focus predominantly on the tools and techniques. Photojournalists depend on technologies that are interdependent, which in turn, creates an interconnected system of devices and skills associated with those devices.

Rudi Volti, in his 1995 book “Society and Technological Change”, points out, “The basic components of a technological system are not just material artifacts; human skills, organizational patterns, and attitudes are of equal importance.

All the criticism of photojournalism that came with professional lapses in ethical judgment involving photo-digital manipulation speaks directly to this issue. In a sense, technological innovation impinges upon professional standards because individual’s get swept up in thinking about and producing results. Instead of working to establish and maintain processes that help to ensure the authenticity, credibility, accuracy, integrity, honesty, and balance of a journalistic process, individuals find themselves obsessed with making images faster and cheaper.

Photojournalism has become an increasingly important player in a cultural information system – a structure that depends on a convention of learned signs. Photojournalism provides society with an immediate source of visual cues that support a structure mirroring its beliefs, values, attitudes, and prejudices. In other words images, especially news photographs, extract and abstract naturally occurring realities in order to construct new social realities. This shift from the natural to the culture is a result of our need for understanding the world through signs. A news photo, from this perspective, stands in for something outside the original occurrence.

As space and time contracts in our increasingly digitally-mediated universe, so do will our need for greater, cheaper, faster, and easier forms of visual information.

When looking at pictures becomes a question of ethical spectatorship

There is an interesting argument to consider when looking back at the Abu Ghraib prison scandal images -- ethical spectatorship.

In an address at the University of Wisconsin Friday, professor of women's studies at Oberlin College spoke about how the images that were released to the public lead to "the mobilization of shame." For Kozol, just looking at the images makes viewers complicit because they are being asked to "participate in the acts."

In an article about the lecturer, Badger Herald writer Caroline McCormack quoted Kozol stating:

"The dehumanizing violence of the pictures allowed people to be horrified withour seeking significant change, using only their feelings of guilt and shame to validate inactiveness."

If human rights groups get their day in court, we will be faced with thousands more of these images to contemplate. But the shock of the real is gone. Looking just becomes another act of curiousity, and it will mean very little to prevent these sort of incidents in the future.

In many ways, Kozol's perspective is right on target. Have the Abu Ghraib images actually motivated public outrage in a way that images from the Vietnam War have done? For example, Eddie Adam's picture of a South Vietnamese Colonel executing a suspect in cold blood and broad daylight, Nick Ut's image of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm strike, or John Filo's iconic Kent State picture, contributed significantly to public criticism of the U.S. government's continued involvement in the conflict.

Thoughts on the Wired World

Photo Credit: Dennis Dunleavy

Like all human endeavors, technology can be like a double-edged sword. There are wonderful things about technology — assuming it is used to improve our lives, help us communicate better, and make our day to day world easier. On the back side of all the positives, however, there is the feeling that in our rush to accept all the changes technology offers we are also missing something.

I think with all the advantages of text and instant messaging, blogging, podcasting, and digital camera phones, society seems to find itself defaulting to the convenience of immediacy over intimacy. Human beings have certain fundamental needs and face-to-face interaction still remains high up on my list of characteristics.

Our fascination with the computer-mediated world we’ve created begins at the earliest of ages through the instant gratification that clicking a keyboard or moving a mouse brings.

More often now, children in wired environments are moving their media consumption from the television to the Internet. Young people develop a sophistication and acumen with the technology that older generations struggle to understand.

Technological literacy in a digitally mediated universe is imperative, but we must also be careful not to jetison some of our antecedent principles and values in the process. What comes to mind, first and foremost, is the notion of civility in how we communicate with one another. Spam — it’s not just another four-letter-word — it’s the idea that we can avoid confronting others in honest and open ways through passive aggressive behaviors.

Like road rage, spam and flame mail is about venting without thinking. This is what technology enables us to do — spew without considering the consequences of our actions. Just ask disgraced politician Mark Foley, R-Fla., about his indulgences with instant messaging and teenage pages in the White House. The point is that immediacy does not automatically tranlate to intimacy. Despite the attraction of instant and auto everything in our lives today we must still practice the discipline of reflection and patience.

Brendan Koerner (2001) in “Getting the news: How technology is revolutionizing the media,” suggests, “….Consumers are not automatons who simply want to be showered with raw data. The media enviornment may be changing at breakneck speed, but some aspects of human nature will be slow to change” (p.9).

Canned Cocaine

Photo Credit: Thu Hoang Ly/San Jose Mercury News

In our visual journalism class we have just begun to discuss the persuasive characteristics of typography in design. A simple visual analysis of this product may serve as an excellent example. In the highly competitive energy drink market packaging is everything. From the choice of the CocaCola red background to the chalky cocaine white lettering, this design is not only made to standout but also stop people in their tracks for a  double take. There is no mistaking the overt symbolism here, but it does make a person think about the ethical implications of selling a product that associates itself with an opiate.

The San Jose Mercury News has a story about how the drink is being pulled from the shelves of a local Seven-Eleven store because of the possible backlash consumers might have toward the convenient market chain. Apparently the drink is popular with teenage girls.

Tidbits

Manny Crisostomo, a Pulitzer Prize winning phojournalist has just finished his latest project on overweight teens. This is terrific visual stortelling
and writing and worth a look.

What the Duck

Aaron Johnson's cartoon strip "What the Duck" is a romp. His witty comics about digital photography are insightful and fun.

You don't have to photograph professional sports to enjoy making pictures of peak action.  You can get a lot closer and the fields are generally smaller, there are lots of great opportunities to be made taking pictures of youth sports.

The Digital Journalist deserves a lot of credit for producing a online magazine that keeps pace with the changes in the industry while also celebrating the field's long and productive history. Read Lorraine Branham's piece on how the magazine is becoming a valuable learning tool for visual educators.

Former Ohio University Photojournalism Professor Back in the News

Larry Nighswander, formerly the director of Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication, is being sued again by Rebecca Humes after settling a sexual harassment suit out of court in 2005 for $350,000. Humes' latest suit against Nighswander charges, according to an NPPA report, that he failed to comply with a court settlement and "destroy any images he had of her from a topless photo session that triggered her original complaint."

Links to this story:

The Columbus Dispatch
The Athens News
 

Culture Shock

Photo Credit: Reuters

The context in which this image appears is striking. With papparazzi hovering to make that "perfect" shot, 20-year-old Metok Lhanzey confidently struts before them during the "swimwear round" of the Miss Tibet beauty contest recently.

Notice the number of males surrounding the contestant, the angles in which some of them are making images, and the majority of the shooters looking down into the backs of their cameras to review the pictures they have just made.

Held in India and open to the public for the first time, the contest has drawn a great deal of attention around the world not because of it objectifies and stereotypes woman, but because of its underlying political message. Lhanzey, who has spent time in Chinese prisons and first fled Tibet in 1999, believes that the beauty pagent is a way to bring attention to the struggles in her homeland.

According to a Reuters report, Lhanzey said:

"Culture is not like stagnant water that remains in a pool," Lhazey said. "It is like a flowing river, it keeps on evolving, and Tibetan women should go along with this."

In one sense, the Miss Tibet pageant is embellmatic of the fact that there are seemlingly no limits to how far Western cultural values -- with its orientation on materialism and individualism -- can reach.

North Korea: A shot in the dark

Photo Credit: Department of Defense

North Korea -- a nation in the dark?

Is this what we are meant to interpret in this image made by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program showing the Korean peninsula at night?

Are we to accept the visual veracity of this picture as further proof that our world has become increasingly dependent upon images as a way of understanding extremely complex realities?

The image is an explicit form of rhetoric -- loaded with not so subtle ideological meaning. In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark." 

President's Press Secretary: The Buck Stops Here, Give me One

Photo Credit: The New York Times/Sally Ryan

If the proverbial buck stops with the U.S. press secretary's role as intermediary between the president and the public, then the White House's Tony Snow is redefining the role. Not only does the buck stop with Snow, but now he wants people to give him one or two (million).

Snow's recent campaign fund-raising is a target for much media criticism, but beyond the relevancy of Snow's exploits, defining the "news", the image, made by Sally Ryan, is a nice example of "making something out of nothing" photojournalism.

What is meant here is that many photo assignments are aesthetically or graphically challenged. Press conferences, lecturers, or environmental portraits require the photographer to create an image that will not only help viewers understand the context of a story, but also draw them into the scene.

In this case, the photographer uses the rule of thirds to make a somewhat more compelling picture. What the viewer doesn't know is how restrictive these sorts of events can be. Patrons pay a lot of money to hear speakers like Snow and the event handlers are sensitive to allowing packs of photographers roaming through the crowd. Therefore, the photographer must get the most intellectually and emotionally appealing image possible. Not always the easiest of assignments.

Some students in our introduction to visual journalism class have struggled a little with grasping the principle of thirds in a frame. Ryan's picture is a classic example of how the principle is commonly used in news work. Snow's projected image is already in thirds, but by placing one screen slightly off to the side of the others a sense of scale is created. The formula would then be that screen one has a dimensional relationship to screens two and three, just as these to latter screens have a relationship to the whole. That's the gestalt of photojournalism. And that is now news image help to construct social realities for us.

See also my post on The power of thirds.

Cheesecake and the Marines

Photo Credit: AP/Freedom Is Not Free, Tim Mantoani

The Freedom Is Not Free organization is hawking a cheesecake calendar of military personnel to raise money for wounded Marines in the Middle East. On the cover, former Marine Corps Sgt. Rudy Reyes, of Kansas City, Mo. shows off his physique for the calendar 'Americas's Heroes: Reconnaissance Marines'.

What is interesting about this image is how the right leg appears to be amputated. Although there is a leg folded behind the model, it is impossible to miss the irony with about 2700 US military dead and more than 20,000 injured in the conflict. Perhaps that was the photographer's point of view. Afterall, the image was made  helping soldiers and their families that have limbs amputated during the war.

Call it a poetic angle -- the meaning here is hard to miss, even for a casual observer.

Mixed Messages?

The major U.S. news magazines knocked themselves out this week with designs suggesting the slide of the GOP on the political scene in Washington.

Both cover designs are loaded with symbolism which conveys meaning behind the headlines of late.

In the TIME cover, the editors have an elephant walking into darkness, exposing its dirty, flakey posterior to the viewer. Tongue in cheek? Sarcasism? You bet.

For Newsweek, designers went over the top with a superimposed manical-looking Mark Foley peering out as President Bush confidently strides below. The use of the frowning smiley, suggestive of the email icon, anchors the typographic styling.

What is interesting about ideologically motivated design is that in addition to how they can capture an audience's attention, they also tend to blow in the political breeze of perception. The design seems to follow the rhetoric steaming out of Washington with little regard to maintaining any sense of objectivity or balance.

Autumn Lights

How the New York Media Copes with Disaster

Erwitt's new book a monster

Legendary photographer Elliott Erwitt, 78, is releasing his latest book -- a 13-pound, 350-image wonder -- called Personal Best. Culled from more than 2,000 mostly never-before published images, this book promises to be among his best offerings. Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer Miriam Hill has a well-written article on Erwitt in today's online edition.

The grammar of a news photograph

Photo Credit: AP/Ron Edmonds

Without over thinking how meaning is conveyed through news photographs there seems to be a way of explaining the impact of an image more directly.

As in the construction of a sentence, photography, especially news photography, as its own grammatical issues. In a sentence is composed of a group of words that convey one central idea. Likewise news photographs must accomplish the same purpose. In a sentence there is a subject, a verb, and usually a direct object. What this means is that something or someone does something to somebody or something else. There is a central or dominant element acting upon another element.

This is essentially what news photography does -- it edifies. The meaning of an image is directly related to the arrangement of elements in the frame that attempts to convey one main idea, just as a subject in a sentence is relate to its predicate.

Ron Edmonds, a Pulitzer Prize winner, does this well with his photograph of the president gesturing at a news conference today. Without the gesture, the equivalent of a sentence's predicate -- all the elements besides the subject -- the picture would fail.  In this case, the gesture helps to focus the viewer's attention on the intensity of the moment.

Without the gesturing moment, having only a tight shot of the president speaking at a podium would convey little more than saying that the photographer was there. Catching the president gesturing at just the right moment contributes meaning to the frame, just as a carefully worked predicate does in a sentence.

Bad news for journalism

The International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) reports that more journalists have been killed in 2006 than in the past decade.  Around the world, 78 journalists have been murdered this year -- not very good news for freedom of the press.

Photojournalism's promise to society

Photojournalism has always been about the relationship between light and life. Photojournalism is a complex and fully human way of capturing, describing and explaining to others what words often fail to do. From this perspective, photojournalism signifies a social and empathic visual encounter with "reality," one that is capable of accentuating the textured fabric of the human condition with dignity, grace, and compassion.

The skilled photojournalist responds to the world emotionally and intellectually by documenting people, places, and things with honesty and humility. The power of photojournalism resides in its insistence on being a holistic and humanistic enterprise. The photojournalist, in turn, must be faithful to a moment of truth, as he or she encounters the world. Photojournalism, at its best, goads us into considering more consciously events that affect our lives.

Today, we are socially conditioned to a deluge of photojournalistic impressions that meet the eye daily, from the run-of-the- mill to the iconic. Within our visually pervasive culture, photojournalism remains committed to documenting the immediacy and intimacy of life as it unfolds around the corner and across continents.  Photojournalism is about telling stories with a camera – it is a way of allowing the viewer to see beyond the picture-making process by entering into and connecting with humanity and the world as it is fixed within our collective memory of place and time. The photographer’s eye informs, constructs, and shapes social reality. As eyewitness to the tumult and triumph of human endeavor, major and minor, the photographer’s truth – the image – fixes and mediates a moment of time not only as a representative anecdote as well as a reality.

The photojournalist’s eye is informed by the principle of the decisive moment, an expression coined by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to sum up his feelings about the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space. For Bresson, “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.”  Most photojournalists develop the skills needed to capture the decisive moment over many years of practice, for the formula for constructing such pictures, is chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.  For this reason, much of what viewers perceives as news is predicated on the photographer’s capacity to capture the decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event. However, reducing an event to a single fixed moment in time may be problematic. From this perspective images produced through the decisive moment style may fail to explain a complex array of factors leading up to and after the picture has been captured.

Most e-mailed pictures an interesting collection

Photo Credit: AP/ Blanca Huertas

Another most e-mailed picture on Yahoo News today shows what many people find interesting. It's not nukes or the killing fields of Iraq, but the discovery of a new type of finch in South America.

New Video Game Lets Players Kill President

Maybe it's just naive and conventional wisdom that promulgates the myth that people from the Islamic world are somehow less technologically sophicated than Westernized/Industrialized nations. The Washington Post has an article on a recent video game produced by Global Islamic Media Front called "Quest for Bush" that seems to challenge this myth.

Mimicking the popular first-person shooter game "Quest for Saddam," the game lets players hunt down and shoot President Bush and some of his cronies. In the war of hearts and minds both sides -- the U.S. and al_Qaeda are turning to the Internet to capture the interests of a younger generation.

Pretty Pictures or Propaganda?

Photo Credit: Jim Young/Reuters

In a recent survey of blog readers a majority of respondents believe that photo ops constitute a form of manipulation. In the poll (n=380), 22 percent or readers strongly agreed and another 42 percent agreed with the statement "I think photo-ops arranged for the media are a form of manipulation."

It is no secret that a news photograph can convey perspectives, attitudes, and desires more immediately than words. When Yahoo news selected a Rueters image to accompany a story on Bush's conference on school violence, the editors knew what they were doing. The image, a picture made a week earlier in Stockton, California, has all the right stuff. It presents the President in a favorable patriotic light. Using the rule of thirds the photographer carefully frames Bush within a sea of waving flags.

We read pictures literally and symbolically.

 

In this case, the symbolism easily subsumes the literal meaning of Bush and the flags in the frame. In fact, the crowd of people, no telling exactly no many, become secondary information. It's all about portraying a sense of strength and nationalism here. But what does this image have to do with the President's upcoming  conference on school violence?

The trite answer is nothing and everything. The juxtaposition of a week-old photo-op from California on top of a story about Bush's concerns conference are tangential at best. Nevertheless, a careful observer must learn to read between the lines here.

Can images that are juxtaposed against an unrelated text indicate a predisposition on the part of the editors to prime audiences in a particular ideological way?

A Thing for Bling

Phot Credit: Reuters/Charles Platiau

This was one of the most emailed pictures on the Yahoo News Photos site for today. The picture received more than 1,800 votes as a recommended picture. Sometimes, with all our focus on the BIG events, it is easy to miss what the real world finds interesting. That is, interesting enough to email a picture around to friends as a conversation started or a joke.

Stepping on words

Came across a student's handywork in front of the library this morning. It must have taken a lot of patience and a steady hand to fill in so many bricks. The writing was promoting a literary newsletter on campus.

The two faces of a corporate leader

Let the pictures speak for themselves. Ousted Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Patricia Dunn is no longer the same person she was a year ago. Pictured in 2005 in a Hewlett-Packard promotional picture as a glamorous, confident and radiant corporate executive Dunn’s recent appearance in court on charges of spying on her colleagues shows another subdued, embattled and fatigued side of her personality.

Clearly portraits made in a studio -- those that have been retouched  will appear differently than the unaltered pictures made under the unforgiving glare of television camera lights during a court appearance. Nevertheless, the contrast of the two faces of Patricia Dunn is striking. The harshness of the relentless media attention, recurrent cancer  and mounting legal issues is taking its toll. Once named by Forbes Magazine as one of the world's most powerful women, the pictures now reveal someone that fallen from the corporate ladder she had once climbed without seemingly missing a step.

The Power of Thirds

In our Introduction to Visual Journalism class we've been looking at how important the golden section or rule of third is as a fundamental design principle. Recently the cover of Newsweek offers a good example of how this works.

 

This week's cover works both aesthetically and ideologically on viewers. Analyzing this picture lets us consider the interstice between the verbal and the visual as it is the compositional or aesthetic aspects of the frame.

Evaluating the Newsweek cover reveals one of the most persuasive and frequently exploited design tricks, the rule of thirds. In this case, George Bush's tightly cropped face on the right hand third of the frame has a relationship to the out of focus Rumsfeld, which fills the remaining two-third. What this suggests, aesthetically, is that the Bush's one-third relates to Rumsfeld's two-thirds as the two-thirds relates to the whole. The human eye find dynamic asymmetric compositions far more livelier than balanced, more formal scenes.

Gestalt psychology, pushing the concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, aligns itself with modern design principles. Looking closely at the frame, the juxtaposition of the word "Denial" seemingly tattooed across Rumsfeld's forehead provides a leading line into Bush's stern face. The textual element, with its large sans serif bold white with black outlined typography, also happens to be located in the upper left-hand third of the composition -- design real estate considered to be a prime entry point for the human eye. Rumsfeld's gaze, albeit out of focus, also contributes another leading line to the right hand third.

What are the ideological intentions of such an image?

In this instance, the signification or meaning of the frame rests in the tension created between Rumsfeld's gaze and Bush's mouth. Clearly, Bush has the platform, but the intensity of Rumsfeld's stare suggests something other than blind loyalty to the Commander in Chief. Is it a coincidence that the word "Denial" is emblazoned across Rumsfeld’s frontal lobe?

Flat Daddies

 

New York Times Photo

They're called Flat Daddies and Mommies -- life-size cardboard cutouts of soldiers serving overseas.

In an effort to ward off the pangs of loneliness, families of military personnel deployed to the Middle East have resorted to hauling around the likenesses of their loved ones. Flat Daddies and Mommies, usually poster-sized headshots mounted on foam board and supplied by National Guard units, have been seen at soccer games, weddings, and even wrapped in blankets on the couch watching television.

There’s a picture in The New York Times of a Flat Daddy on a swing with his son smiling at him the way son’s do. It’s a tender moment, almost whimsical. Then, reality sets in.

But what will this picture mean if flat daddy doesn’t come home?

What if mommy gets lonely?

The novelty of the Flat Daddy began shortly after the start of the Iraq conflict, but the trend has been catching on in recent weeks, especially with all the media attention.

During a war, photographs have always served as treasured reminders of those left on both sides of the front lines, but the latest fixation on families carrying life-size portable papas and mamas in the trunk strikes a tender – much more political -- nerve.

According to the White House, “Since September 11th, more than 243,000 members of the National Guard have been mobilized for various missions in the War on Terror.” 

The real emotional costs of the current conflicts in the Middle East on U.S. military personnel and their families can never be truthfully told by the warm and fuzzy features stories found recently in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other media. The media, in typical fashion, is masking the reality and angst these families now face. In other words, the pictures and words seem to turn tumult into triviality.

What gives the Flat Daddy picture in The NY Times currency and news values is not relevancy in terms of the human costs of the war, but quirkiness, novelty and curiosity.

What boils beneath the warm and fuzzy, feel-good, “I miss daddy or mommy” story is more alarming. The war is becoming trivialized.

What lies beneath the surface of the picture of a boy and his flat daddy is the reality that daddy exists in a liminal state. Flat Daddy is caught in the vice grip of human memory. Flat Daddy and his real-life double somewhere in the desert exist between the ominous states of ambiguity and indeterminacy -- no news story can ever completely speak the truth to this sort of power.

What appears at first a light-hearted picture of coping with loss is, in fact, a decisive and profound image of sadness and despair.