May 12, 2004
The revolution will not be retouched : Some comments on Shirky's "Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation"
by Liza Sabater
This morning I posted my musings about the Rene Burri show at Hermes gallery. In them I said :
Burri's work looks amazingly last century in a very modernist sort of way. It's not just the fact he made minimalist "portraits" out of the architecture. It's the fact that, in light of the images coming from Iraq, in light of the photographic revolution brought by digital cameras, especially camera-phones, and in light of the personal publishing revolution we are in the midst with blogs, photoblogs but most importantly MOBLOGGING, the aesthetics of photography has changed dramatically. Even Burri's photojournalist work looks well thought out, staged, clean.
Capturing the moment, hunting for the ephemeral is what photoblogging and especially photo moblogging is all about and, in a sense, what will define aesthetics in the 21st century. Go to Hermes but also go to all the Magnum events (if possible) and visit their website. You will find some of the most historically important photographs of the last century. After viewing them maybe you will feel that, indeed, they capture a vernacular and ideology that is different from our times.
Little did I know Clay was one step ahead of me with moblogging as an agent of change. In his article, Many-to-Many: Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation, Shirky writes about how photo moblogging from the front lines is changing the way propaganda is waged because hegemony through control of the "direct perception" of what the powerful say is "factual" is lost once images and their distribution are in the hands of the people.
This is what we are seeing now relative to the military's control of information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of DAB's ---Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is outside the military's hands.
The spread of images from Iraq, both relatively plain ones like most of what's on the YAFRO blogs to the horrifying images of torture and abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are all part of the removal of bottlenecks that will change the political structure in ways we can't predict.
Maybe we really should look back to the Rodney King case for the beginning of the end of controlled media. People reacted to the fact that a few recorded minutes on tape were not enough to serve justice because the jurors refused to give power and credit to "facts" not agenced through an institutional media outlet. The recording was too grainy. The light was not right. Things did not look crisp and clear. The angles were not right because bodies moved naturally and not for the camera. In other words, the aesthetics of the video made it hard to believe that it was (at the time) a legitimate source of information.
Fast-forward to our century.
In October of 2003, New York Magazine ran a cover story called, Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On, a look at how cyberporn had change the dating scene among the 20 something crowd. This chestnut stuck in my mind ever since:
Though Rick, who has never had a serious girlfriend, doesn't consider looking at cyberporn a problematic pastime, he will admit that it has affected his interactions with women --and not just those apparitions at Suite 16. "I think it's made me more picky," he says. "These girls on the computer are just so hot. Obviously, you want to get with a girl like that. So you may be at a bar with a girl, and she's really cool, but she's not a "10", you know? She's cool, she's cute, but you quickly start to notice flaws." Meanwhile, the women who manage to come off as relatively flawless are curiously categorized in his mind: "Say I see a girl who's hot, I'll think, That girl is like a porn star!" At the same time, he adds, "I'd be worried if I met a girl at a bar and three hours later we were in bed."
I've been working on some notes on why I do not like porno. For one, I cannot understand the lack of body and pubic hair. And do not get me started with the silicon breasts. If women's breast expand and "grow" in size during arousal, how will a guy know a woman is aroused if she is carrying permanently two inflated plastic bags on her chest? But is this practice exclusive to the adult industry? Of course it is not. The reason why porno bothers me so much is for the same reason most visual medial depress me : They're all about retouching not just the photographs and film but the actual bodies of anybody that works in front of a camera.
One example of the willing can be found on a very funny piece Salon recently ran about Blue teeth. There are scores of media people with teeth so white they turn a light hue of blue. (Interestingly enough, most of the people sampled were found working at FoxNews.) The retouching madness does not just extend to the those willing to be cosmeticly enhanced. While the color of Naomi Campbell's eyes seem to change with the weather, Cindy Crawford had to put a clause in her contracts barring digital removal of her mole. It happens to the unsuspecting man as well. Viggo Mortensen's scar seems to create quite a high level of anxiety in art departments across the nation: Look at his recent press and you'll notice said scar seems to appear and disappear like magic.
If we look back at the Rodney King tapes and look forward to the images moblogged by soldiers from Iraq and the connection is there : They scream "this image was not touched by PhotoShop". They feel immediate because they are imperfect. They are real to us, enough to consider them fact and evidence, because they are unfiltered, unmediated and, more importantly, served almost instantly.
Remember the JennyCam? Yes, there was the titillation and sex but JennyCam became legendary because what you saw on the square was immediate, unfiltered, unretouched. Not that what was outside the square was "real" in any way --that apartment could have been easily a stage. The real hook was the "unPhotoShopedness" of the content.
So Shirky, I believe we have to coin a new motto. It's not that the revolution will be blogged or moblogged. The revolution will not be retouched.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Aesthetics, Art, Blogs, Culture, Empire, Media, Moblogging, Photography, Politics, Publishing, Video, Viggo Mortensen, War
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