walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-02-17 02:08 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-02-17 02:08 am
don't have much baggage to lay at your feet
Sent off an email to F. at the Honors Department before leaving for class this morning; by this afternoon ISIS reported my Total Debt had been reduced to $0.00, and I can get behind that.
I really ought to do the readings for anthropology, because they're usually so interesting. Okay, this week's article sounded horrific (according to the group last night), the worst kind of inaccessible, academic jargon, full of phrases like rhetorically-induced imperatives, but now that I'm actually reading it over for myself, it really doesn't seem impossible; of course, after some of the pieces that Murchek happily passed out for us to slog through, including Derrida and Roland Barthes (a man with a passionate love for every piece of punctuation but the period), anything is easier to read. And this author is referencing Barthes! Studium and punctum and I remember that after I got past the horror of having to read through his sentences, his ideas of considering photography were really cool ones. The discussion we generated today was full of interesting problems to talk about but not necessarily come to any conclusions over: What is the tension between "realism" and "formalism"? Should art serve science in some way? Is there a meeting place between facts and art? And is it ever the case that photography captures the experience of the other rather than the experience of the photographer?
The author was big on "the Boundary," which we interpreted in at least three ways: the divide between "art" and "reality," the division between the anthropologist and the other, and the disciplinary boundary that anthropology draws around itself; I mentioned that the author herself did a pretty good job of maintaining that last boundary with an article written in such coded language. She talked a great deal about postcards, saying the tourist industry depends on "easy closed readings of images." We agreed; we couldn't say for certain whether this was necessarily bad, or if there were ways around it. We did determine that a postcard was essentially a fragment, an iconic fragment that often serves for the whole of a region, a nation, or a people. I am in Chile; this is London; here is Florida—the beach in full sun, a palm tree, tits, and a bikini. All the knowledge we possess, all of the images we see and own, are fragments broken off the whole. I would argue, there is no "whole." You cannot collect all the pieces together and make them fit into a single frame—not for your own experiences, and not for the world.
And finally we remarked on the still photograph as the kiss of death—that as soon as you take a picture of something, it ceases to be alive. We agreed that looking back over the thousands of digital pictures you took on vacation is often vaguely dissatisfying—did it really happen that way? Do we remember the memory or only the picture of it? Aren't the scenes we remember most vividly not the tourist hotspots but the unexpected moments no one had time to capture on film? I said, a photograph can make you lazy. We look at the image we took and let that one iconic representation stand for an entire experience: nothing happened before, and nothing came after. And this is false. Do not forget the fourth dimension. We fall into the trap of letting photographs stand on their own, of standing silent while the picture speaks, but we forget to ask the picture where it came from and where it was going. When we present our assignments in class we treat them like poems workshopped in a seminar, the artist silent while the class discusses, until the end when there can be questions or rebuttals. It perpetuates the illusion. But can you have the photographer's voice tagging after every picture it belongs to, babbling its story into your ear as you look it over? I waited three days until the rain cleared and the light was good; he turned away at the last second so his profile laid stark against the stone; they ended up waiting for hours and nobody ever came.
The Capoeira kids were performing outside after class and I stood and watched for a few minutes before heading across the street to hole up in Java Lounge and do some reading for the essay due tomorrow. Java Lounge was swinging, by the way, and among the many patrons was H. from the Cambridge trip, who is just as weird as I remember. *shuffles away nervously*
I think I have to take back everything I said about being able to read difficult pieces of writing, because it turns out that I can't read at all. Over an hour and a half, a bad cup of coffee (somebody remind me not to experiment with the roasts and just order a freaking latte next time), and two pieces of furniture (the beanbag, and then the couch I snagged when the guy sitting on it finally left), I got through, like, twenty-five pages of Robert M. Levine's Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1895-1897. My problems were multi-fold, even after the subject of the book is taken into account: I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't not pay attention to the conversations of everyone around me, and I was trying to read for the purposes of writing later, meaning I tried first highlighting and then note-taking, and both times felt like I might as well be copying down the entire book. I have no idea how normal people do this. The professor called this a take-home exam, but it consists of one essay question, and the rest of us just call that an essay, period. We're supposed to use turnitin.com as well as bring a hard copy to class tomorrow. That's all fine. I'm just not excited about writing 1000-1500 words on this thing. We talked about the book at great length last week, including most of the things he's looking for in our responses, so it shouldn't be too incredibly painful. But I'll make sure it is.
I really ought to do the readings for anthropology, because they're usually so interesting. Okay, this week's article sounded horrific (according to the group last night), the worst kind of inaccessible, academic jargon, full of phrases like rhetorically-induced imperatives, but now that I'm actually reading it over for myself, it really doesn't seem impossible; of course, after some of the pieces that Murchek happily passed out for us to slog through, including Derrida and Roland Barthes (a man with a passionate love for every piece of punctuation but the period), anything is easier to read. And this author is referencing Barthes! Studium and punctum and I remember that after I got past the horror of having to read through his sentences, his ideas of considering photography were really cool ones. The discussion we generated today was full of interesting problems to talk about but not necessarily come to any conclusions over: What is the tension between "realism" and "formalism"? Should art serve science in some way? Is there a meeting place between facts and art? And is it ever the case that photography captures the experience of the other rather than the experience of the photographer?
The author was big on "the Boundary," which we interpreted in at least three ways: the divide between "art" and "reality," the division between the anthropologist and the other, and the disciplinary boundary that anthropology draws around itself; I mentioned that the author herself did a pretty good job of maintaining that last boundary with an article written in such coded language. She talked a great deal about postcards, saying the tourist industry depends on "easy closed readings of images." We agreed; we couldn't say for certain whether this was necessarily bad, or if there were ways around it. We did determine that a postcard was essentially a fragment, an iconic fragment that often serves for the whole of a region, a nation, or a people. I am in Chile; this is London; here is Florida—the beach in full sun, a palm tree, tits, and a bikini. All the knowledge we possess, all of the images we see and own, are fragments broken off the whole. I would argue, there is no "whole." You cannot collect all the pieces together and make them fit into a single frame—not for your own experiences, and not for the world.
And finally we remarked on the still photograph as the kiss of death—that as soon as you take a picture of something, it ceases to be alive. We agreed that looking back over the thousands of digital pictures you took on vacation is often vaguely dissatisfying—did it really happen that way? Do we remember the memory or only the picture of it? Aren't the scenes we remember most vividly not the tourist hotspots but the unexpected moments no one had time to capture on film? I said, a photograph can make you lazy. We look at the image we took and let that one iconic representation stand for an entire experience: nothing happened before, and nothing came after. And this is false. Do not forget the fourth dimension. We fall into the trap of letting photographs stand on their own, of standing silent while the picture speaks, but we forget to ask the picture where it came from and where it was going. When we present our assignments in class we treat them like poems workshopped in a seminar, the artist silent while the class discusses, until the end when there can be questions or rebuttals. It perpetuates the illusion. But can you have the photographer's voice tagging after every picture it belongs to, babbling its story into your ear as you look it over? I waited three days until the rain cleared and the light was good; he turned away at the last second so his profile laid stark against the stone; they ended up waiting for hours and nobody ever came.
The Capoeira kids were performing outside after class and I stood and watched for a few minutes before heading across the street to hole up in Java Lounge and do some reading for the essay due tomorrow. Java Lounge was swinging, by the way, and among the many patrons was H. from the Cambridge trip, who is just as weird as I remember. *shuffles away nervously*
I think I have to take back everything I said about being able to read difficult pieces of writing, because it turns out that I can't read at all. Over an hour and a half, a bad cup of coffee (somebody remind me not to experiment with the roasts and just order a freaking latte next time), and two pieces of furniture (the beanbag, and then the couch I snagged when the guy sitting on it finally left), I got through, like, twenty-five pages of Robert M. Levine's Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1895-1897. My problems were multi-fold, even after the subject of the book is taken into account: I couldn't get comfortable, I couldn't not pay attention to the conversations of everyone around me, and I was trying to read for the purposes of writing later, meaning I tried first highlighting and then note-taking, and both times felt like I might as well be copying down the entire book. I have no idea how normal people do this. The professor called this a take-home exam, but it consists of one essay question, and the rest of us just call that an essay, period. We're supposed to use turnitin.com as well as bring a hard copy to class tomorrow. That's all fine. I'm just not excited about writing 1000-1500 words on this thing. We talked about the book at great length last week, including most of the things he's looking for in our responses, so it shouldn't be too incredibly painful. But I'll make sure it is.
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This screams *MEME* to me. I'd love to do this with some of my pictures. More interestingly, how about pictures of *ourselves*? Can we ever remember what we were thinking at the exact moment the shutter was released? Can a photograph ever capture more than just my smiles, and reveal the real me?
no subject