Transcript CM135 DocuPhotography and Ideology

Documentary
Photography
Ideology and
Propaganda
The CM135 Assignment
Everyone in groups of three?
Please re-read the CM135 Assignment and Guidelines
Informed theoretical engagement essential so please study
the Recommended Readings for each week.
Submission date and location:
Friday 25th of March- Room QG15
2-3 p.m. Pat Brereton
3-4 p.m. plus Sorcha Lowrey
From Headline: The National Media Monitoring Programme)
Representations of suicide will be discuss)
The ‘IT’?
Dennotations
Connotations
Ideological Analysis
Let the
The Literal
images
What is in the
speak to you image
Meanings from
the wider
society
Which interest is been
advanced
Your first
impression/s
Content
Lighting
Cultural
Meaning
Questions of power
What is
going on?
Codes
Cues
Class
Gender
Persuasion
“expressive
content’
Colours
Meaning of
colours
Selling
Key Text- Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies plus
Recommended Readings on Moodle
Stuart Hall on our
concepts of the media:
‘Reflect’ = neutral
‘Represent’ = active
Media as:
Gatekeepers
Agenda-setters
Reality Shapers
“Representation…implies the active
work of selecting and presenting,
structuring and shaping…not merely
the transmitting of an already
existing meaning, but the more
active labour of making things
mean” (Hall, 1982)
Introduction to
Documentary Photography/Film
Rejection of romanticism
Use of ‘real people’ instead of actors
Use of real locations, not sets
Is political – explicitly rejecting/promoting dominant ideology
John Grierson coined the tern ‘documentary film’
in the 1920s [v Hollywood].
Documentary photography,
a particular kind of social investigation/persuasion.
Philanthropists, propagandists and reformers
Photograph as document
To document -> to change
Documentary photography and the (powerless) 'other'.
Colonised peoples, (quasi) anthropology.
‘The Poor’: documented, represented, researched and
surveyed. Photographers like hunters in an urban jungle,
surveying the unknown/anonymous and the unnamed who
returned the gaze, put without power.
Lawrence
Collection
Jacob Riis (1849-1914)
Migrated to New York in 1870.
1877, became a police reporter for the New York Tribune and
Evening Sun.
Focused on New York East Side slums.
The ‘invention’ flash benefited his work.
How the Other Half Lives : Studies Among the Tenements of
NY (1890) was the first illustrated book of its kind.
See useful Riis website:
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/vads_catalogue/jrcal_description.html
‘A Cave Dweller, One of 4 Pedlars Who Slept’ (1890)
An Ancient Lodger in Eldridge Street with the Plank on which
She Slept, c.1890 (note the shut eyes).
Definitions of ideology
“A relatively coherent system of
values, beliefs or ideas shared
by some social group and often
taken [by members of that
group] as natural or inherently
true.”
Bordwell and Thompson,
Film Art: An Introduction
Ideology as:
(i) ‘False consciousness' (ruling class/ruling ideas) or
(ii) ‘World view of a class' (Jorge Larrain) or
(iii) Gender or
(iv) National or other group.
Ideology masks contradiction, legitimises power,
capitalist accumulation (Bill Nichols).
“Ideology is those representations that reflect the interests of
Power” (Gillian Rose Visual Methodologies)
Dominant ideology and ‘common sense’.
Definitions of ideology
“Ideology is a social process that works on and through
every social subject that, like every social process,
everyone is ‘in’, whether or not they ‘know’ or understand it”.
“It has the function of producing an obvious reality that
social subjects can assume and accept, precisely as if it
had not been socially produced and did not need to be
‘known’ at all.”
Kavanagh, ‘Ideology’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study
Ideological Assumptions
A family consists of a man, a woman, and one or more
children.
A woman is meant to be a wife and mother. There is
something aberrant about women who choose not to marry
or remain childless.
Whites are superior to other races.
If we work hard, we will be successful.
People from inner city Dublin are poor: they do not work hard
enough.
‘There is no alternative’
Companies come to Ireland to create jobs
Antonio Gramsci and Hegemony
The concept of hegemony connects questions of culture,
power and ideology
Gramsci argued that power can be wielded at the level of
culture or ideology, ie through our consent to and acceptance
of current social arrangements
Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940)
Teacher/sociologist started photographing Ellis Island
immigrants in 1905.
Photographed working men, women and children.
Employed by National Child Labour Committee to record the
living conditions of children thoughout America.
Known for his ‘Work Portraits’ which emphasise the
contribution of labour to American society.
Like Jacob Riis influenced legislative reform.
Lewis W. Hine - Ellis Island- George Eastman House
http://www.geh.org/fm/lwhprints/htmlsrc/ellis-island_idx00001.html#77:0177:0001
‘Italians at Ellis Island. Good raw materials for the melting pot’ (1905)
Newsie (1912)
Hine’s Empire State
Building (1930-31)
portraits appeared in
Men at Work
In Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) Louis Althusser
(1918-90) identified two aspects of the state:
-the ideological state apparatus (churches, education, media);
-the repressive state (army, police, prisons etc.).
Discussed how subordination was reproduced.
Built on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, a term
explaining how ideological co-option and consent was
achieved by dominant groups without recourse to coercion.
According to Althusser under capitalism, education had
become the dominant `ideological state apparatus'.
When each of the ‘ideological state apparatuses,' including
the media, are considered as ‘sites of struggle,' of conflicting
ideologies competing for hegemony, then the notion of a
totally hermetic ideology is inconceivable.
Neither can ideology be considered as a constant.
In other words each ideology contains elements from other
ideologies and are in a constant process of interaction. This
understanding of ideology, originating in Marx's writings, has
been referred to as the ‘dominant ideology thesis‘
(The Dominant Ideological Thesis by N. Abercrombie et al.)
Structuralism [not discussed in class]
Structuralism is an approach/method concerned with
perception and description of structures, with a focus, not on
the level of the observed, but on that which is below or behind
‘empirical reality’. The world as relational. (Madan Sarup)
Meanings always hidden, never transparent.
Richard Kearney “it is not man who speaks language, but
language who speaks man”.
Saussure
Levi Strauss
Lacan
Althusser
Foucault
langue and parole
Rites and rituals in anthropology.
Dreams and unconsciousness.
Science/ideology.
Discourse of power/knowledge
Dorethea Lange [USA, 1895-1965]
Member of the Photo-Secession.
Opened her own photographic studio in San Francisco
in 1916 (-1940).
Member of the Photographic Unit of the Farm Security
Administration, 1936-1942.
Staff photographer with Life between 1954-1955.
Lange stated that her camera was the first thing she put on
each morning.
See Lange’s The Irish Countryman [DCU library]
White Angel Bread Line
(1932)
Next time try the Train (1932) by D Lange
Migrant Mother(1936) by Dorothea Lange
Florence Owens Thompson
‘Pea Pickers Camp’ at Nipomo, California.
In Frank Parkin's sociological analysis of social
class, he establishes links to dominant, negotiated and
oppositional ‘meaning systems’.
Parkin's analysis is valuable in the way he addresses aspects
of class consciousness. According to Parkin each meaning
system "derives from a different social source, and each
promotes a different moral interpretation of class inequality".
They are as follows:
1. The dominant value system.
2. The subordinate value system.
3. The radical value system.
Frank Parkin provides the background for Stuart Hall’s (1984)
analysis of encoding and decoding of media messages.
In Encoding/Decoding Stuart Hall puts forward three
hypothetical audience responses to the televisual image, a
set of responses which can be related to the photographic
image:
(i) The dominant-hegemonic position.
(ii) The negotiated code or position.
(iii) The oppositional code.
In ‘The Determinants of News Photographs’ Hall argues that
the ideological occurs at the connotative level, at a level
beyond the literal…difficult to ‘pin down’…ideologies
’produce recognitions of the world as we have already
learned to appropriate it…” (p.239).
In Theories of Discourse (1986) Diane Macdonnell states
that during the late 1960s and early 1970s: "certain shifts
took place in the ways of considering how meanings are
constructed” and "a crucial argument concerning discourse
is that meanings are to be found only in the concrete forms of
differing social and institutional practices: there can be no
meaning in ‘language’ ".
The term Discourse which frequently appears in Michel
Foucault's texts intrinsically linked to power relations.
According to Michel Foucault the Paris ’68 student
struggles had challenged the aims and methods of various
disciplines which in turn directed attention to the:
".. full range of hidden mechanisms through which a society
conveys its knowledge and ensures its survival under the
mask of knowledge: newspapers, television, technical
schools, and the lycee (even more than the university)”.
Starts by asking how is power excercised and by what
means, then what are the effects of power.
Discourse and ‘discursive formations’.
In his writings on television, John Fiske also uses the term
‘discourse,’ arguing that it:
"generates certain ways of talking and thinking about a topic, it
is not reflective of an external reality, but generative. Reality, or
rather our sense of reality, is constantly produced and
reproduced discursively" (Channels of Discourse, 1989).
As with Foucault, Fiske also views the discourse/power
relationship as significant and states:
"as society can only be understood in terms of power and
resistances, of domination and subordination, so too can
texts. Texts also contain dominant, powerful voices, and
subordinate intransigent ones. Their form attempts to exert
power and control over their potential meanings, but this
power is resisted by other formal characteristics, their gaps
and spaces, their contradictions, their irrepressible
oppositional voices that must be there because of the
multiaccentual nature of any sign system in a divided society.
The text's struggle to control its readings is met by the
oppositional struggle of its readers to make their socially
pertinent readings out of its resources”.
The Farm Security Administration(FSA)
A Roosevelt New Deal project to rally support for his plan to aid rural poor
suffering the effects of the depression i.e. dust bowl conditions sung about
by Woody Gutherie and written about by John Steinbeck (The Grapes of
Wrath).
Existed between 1935 and 1943.
Roy Stryker headed up the photography section.
The FSA employed Walker Evans, Dorethea Lange,
Authur Rothstein etc.
Over 100,000 images were filed/indexed.
See useful website on the FSA: http://chnm.gmu.edu/fsa/
Woody Gutherie- Talking Dustbowl Blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkAxuqrVNBM
Walker Evans American, (1903-1975).
Let us Praise Famous Men appeared in 1941
(with James Agee) [DCU library]
Serialised in Time, Fortune.
Evans admired Degas, liked stage-like image.
Check out:
Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, NY, 1931.
Evans, Washroom in the Dog Run of Floyd Burrough’s Home,
Hale County, Alabama, 1936
(Simplicity and glimpse into living quarters).
Evans, Floyd and Lucille Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama,
1936.
Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama (1936)
Authur Rothstein [American, b.194-1985]
Fleeing a Dust Storm (1936)
Is the young child is the key to the photograph ?
The struggle to keep up.. against markers
Was the work of the FSA propaganga ?
However benign….
Early Public Relations (PR) ‘spin’ ?
“Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to the
totalitarian state”
Naom Chomsky Media Control: The Spectacular
Achievements of Propaganda
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991),
the process of production of meanings, signs and value in social life;
-a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
-ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
-false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
-systematically distorted communication; that which offers a position for a
subject;
-forms of thought motivated by social interests;
-identity thinking;
-socially necessary illusion;
-the conjuncture of discourse and power; the medium in which conscious
social actors make sense of their world;
-action-oriented sets of beliefs;
-the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
-semiotic closure;
-the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relation to a
social structure;
-the process whereby said life is converted to a natural reality.
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo4.html
Edward Steichen The Family of Man.
Originally published in 1955.
Contrasted to……….
Robert Frank The Americans (1959)
Introduction to The Americans (1959) written by Jack Kerouac
author of On the Road (1957).
Both in DCU library
From On the Road by
Robert Frank
V Volosinov [Marxism and the Philosophy of Language]
claims that: "Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle".
Are photographs so open in terms of connotations/meanings
that news editors must anchor them with captions?
Ideological gate keeping?
Combined with cropping the meaning can be transformed.
Discourses "generate certain ways of talking and thinking about
a topic. It is not reflective of an external reality, but generative.
Reality, or rather our sense of reality, is constantly produced
discursively" - John Fiske.
Eugene Smith
Mercury spillage from a Chisso factory into the fishing port of
Minamata caused a disease of the nervous system. The local
defence committee contacted Smith who was working in
Japan at the time (early 1970s). Once committed he and his
wife Aileen Miko Sprague stuck with the case despite been
badly attacked by Chisso staff members.
According to Smith "the best way to find ideas for photo
essays is to be immersed in enough activities and different
people to keep your mind stimulated".
Member of Magnum- the photographic agency (1955-1959).
Tomoku Uemura in her Bath (1972) by Eugene Smith
http://www.bhopal.net/otherbhopals/archives/smith_minimata.jpg
Sebastiao Salgado
Sebastiao Salgado Other Americas (1986)
Workers : An Archaeology of the Industrial Age [DCU library]
Sebastiao Salgado’s Website:
http://www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/
Changing the World with Children
http://www.unicef.org/salgado/
Sebastiao Salgado: The Photographer as Activist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6fRykp6nRQ
Refugees in the Korem Camp, Ethiopia (2004)
Jenny Matthews
documents the cost of war
on women and children.
Fina Kamara,
Freetown, Sierra Leone (1999).
Jenny Matthews.
Dir district. Community based school
Jenny’s webpage:
http://www.jennymphoto.com/info.html
My hope is that CM135 Part 1 has opened a door on the
wonderful world of photography (photojournalism,
documentary photography et al) and in introducing you to
Visual Methodologies helped to make you engagement more
informed and more fulfilling.
Enjoy/share your finds articles/images via the CM135 Forum.