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cameras, illusion, reality « Previous | |Next »
January 5, 2010

This Chris Ware video from This American Life is a very interesting interpretation of photography:

Disturbing. According to Ware the cultural effects of the photographic apparatus result in a disengagement from what is happening in everyday life. We take photos of people suffering rather than helping them. We are disconnected from people when we are behind the camera lens and part of the photographic apparatus.

The effect on us of this waning of moral response to suffering is a haunting melancholia. Picturing "illusions of reality" is divorced from ethics. We live in a world of images as mirrors that reflect fictions.

Ware's interpretation is a welcome break from the affirmative commentaries on photography in the photography establishment that have engaged in a celebration of the objective powers of the machine or the subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist. Ware points to an "optical unconscious" of the photographic gaze.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:38 PM | | Comments (1)
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This is the Chris Ware who produced the graphic novel, "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth" in 2000, which is accepted as the first formal masterpiece of the medium.