• Still Images
  • How we catalog our existence; how we document our history
  • Photos are often more powerful than a moving image
  • Photos as symbols
  • You have to choose the direction in which you will point your camera
  • The Civil Rights Movement
  • African Americans had no friends in local media
  • “How does a 20-year-old white boy from Queens become the only photographer covering the civil rights movement in Birmingham?”
  • Photography is the most powerful medium one can use to cover war – Intimacy, immediacy, longevity, truth
  • Vietnam
  • Monk set himself on fire in act of protest
  • Suspect executed in the streets of Saigon
  • Young girl badly burned by napalm
  • Kent State
  • Life Magazine – The faces of one week’s death toll
  • A Picture of the whole Earth?
  • Eliminate the notion of the infinite-ness of Earth
  • No political boundaries – only oceans, continents, and clouds – “Spaceship Earth”
  • Looked fragile – The beginnings of the ecology movement
  • “To manipulate an image is to control a people”
  • You cannot take a picture of something that is not in front of the camera – Cameras don’t lie – Photographic evidence
  • Crimes/court cases
  • Genocides/atrocities
  • Politics (Gary Hart)
  • The Presidential Photo-Op
  • People absorb perception rather than the actual image
  • Controlling the Image – Photography During the Gulf War
  • Government-sponsored censorship?
  • Photojournalists were paired with a press liaison who would tell them what and when to shoot
  • All information distilled and packaged by the government
  • Tales From the Digital Age – Photo Manipulation
  • Benefits and problems
  • Photos no longer present the “Truth with a capital ‘T’”
  • Role of journalism can be lost – Lack of confidence/credibility
  • Photographers are in the memory business
  • Longevity
  • Reproducible
  • Repetitive
  • Appropriating Images
  • Images in art
  • “Let’s think about what pictures mean”
  • When we close your eyes, what do we see? – Photos!