Photography and Surveillance

In 2013, there seems to be an increasing urgency from the public for transparency; this has become evident to me from a few areas of interest, beginning with a seemingly public distrust in governmental spending brought to light during the 2008 deficit. More recently, Man Bartlett in his presentation in ‘The Pit’ on Monday, discussed his Twitter account that was highly controversial, where he tweeted all of his financial transactions over the course of a year and detailed discounts he made with particular art dealers and not with others. At the National Block and Bridle conference, in Iowa, I also learned that farmers are trying to be as transparent as possible to rebuke the public’s belief that ‘factory farming’ is harmful to animal welfare. These notions of transparency correlate with any of the Photography and Surveillance readings about police surveillance by the public, because of the growing effort to stop police brutality. As McElroy points out, surveillance of police officers is never looked down upon, until an officer is caught acting out of line. In a case, like Goods, which was quite effectively unnerving, it seems that any PUBLIC arrest, which will be released in the paper, is public information and therefore the filming of it does not overstep any boundary of privacy. Transparency in our police system could reduce many cases of officers abusing their powers, as well as those who are doing the right thing in their job; transparency in the greater social spheres, lends itself to more openness, not just in the literal sense, but perhaps it ties into the notion of post-modernism in its effort to bring to light contemporary social issues that need to be addressed.