Photography and Surveillance: Webcam RATters

The webcam image photographic work of Cheryl Sourkes definitely left me feeling unsettled and reminded me eerily of an article I found online a couple of months ago. The article “Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams” can be found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/rat-breeders-meet-the-men-who-spy-on-women-through-their-webcams/ and discusses the way in which hackers use a virus program called Remote Administration Tool to not only execute commands on their victims’ computers, but also to turn their webcam into a one-way surveillance camera.  The creepiest part about these self-named “ratters” is that they can infect computers and operate webcams without the user having any idea that anything is occurring. The ratters are able to stealthily invade the homes of their so-called “slaves” and watch them for hours on end- they consider this a form of entertainment. The ease in which the hackers can operate in secret as well as the user-friendly nature of the Remote Administration Tool software really enable anyone with access to a computer the ability to spy on anyone else who possesses a laptop with a webcam. While it may be argued that the internet is a “public” place, and therefore any content posted online is fair game to be viewed by anyone, anywhere, these “slaves” are not posting anything online or even necessarily accessing the internet. Technology has increase the extent to which people are able to spy on each other to such an alarming magnitude that we are not even safe in our own homes. The Sourkes images disturbed me because they seemed to fall in the same category as these images and videos captured by “ratters” and Sourkes does not explain on her website exactly where and how she obtained these images. This art just further enforces the scary truth that anytime you use your computer equipped with a webcam, anyone could be watching.

Representations of Trauma

Of all the readings this week, I found Randell’s essay “Speaking the Unspeakable” the most thought provoking. I was particularly interested by her discussion of the representation of trauma through television and cinema and the forms it takes through each medium. It had never before occurred to me that television is used to depict the informational aspect of trauma, while cinema is used to harvest collective trauma for entertainment purposes.
It was interesting, also, to note the different ways in which each of these video mediums goes about representing trauma. On television, live news coverage displayed during or immediately after a traumatic event is very fragmented. News is presented to the viewer in short, flashing clips from multiple channels and sources all at once. This fragmentation of the traumatic event serves not only to diffuse the tragedy and make it easier for the viewer to comprehend, but also relates to the fragmented way in which the human brain itself experiences the shock of trauma. Cinema, on the other hand, works to diffuse the trauma through incorporating it into various fantasy narratives. This displaces the trauma from any lived experiences and memories the viewer might have, and although the depiction of the trauma itself will still most likely evoke personal memories, the fantasy of the film allows for the translation of trauma for entertainment purposes.   

Conceptual Photography: Photography as "art"

Something I found interesting about contemporary photography is the fact that it was able to finally secure the position of photography in the art gallery by elevating photography to the status of “art”, but it goes about doing so in a very different way than previous types of photography that attempted similar things, such as pictorialism. Both the conceptual and the pictorialist photograph attempt to prove photography’s place as an art form by arguing the presence of the hand of man- the photograph is not simply a document recorded by a machine. However, pictorialism attempts to do so through presenting the physical photograph as a work of art by relating it to past art forms, such as painting, through darkroom manipulation techniques while contemporary photography elevates photography as a whole to an “art” form by proving that photography is an effective medium through which a larger work of art can be conceived. Pictorialism presents the photograph in and of itself as a work of art through the use of techniques that are specific to that medium, while contemporary photography presents photography as a medium which can be manipulated through the use of other art mediums (painting, text, printmaking) in order to create a piece in which the use of the photograph lends to the creation of a larger meaning. The use of the photograph in contemporary photography lends itself to the desire to challenge the status quo because of its relation to reality, thus contemporary photography presents the medium of photography as a whole as a true form of “art”.

Society and the Spectacle

We, as a culture, are immensely drawn to the photographed spectacle. The mass media is well aware of this fact and uses the constructed spectacle to exploit us in almost every aspect of our social lives. The most obvious means through which we are presented with a constructed spectacle is through advertising. Advertisers exploit the “naturalness” believability of photography in order to present the viewer with a fetishized image of whatever they are trying to sell. The ironic part is that society has definitely caught onto the fact that all advertisements are constructed and nearly all material the media presents us with is manipulated in some way, yet we continue to buy into it all. Why is this? It seems that advertisers know how to appeal to a certain part of the human psyche without the viewer even noticing this is happening. The idea of the denoted and connoted message and their presence in advertisement photography seems to explain why these fabrications are able to influence society to the extent that they do. The denoted message, or the literal reality presented by the advertisement photograph is obviously constructed, whether it be through selection of what is to be included in the image, or digital manipulation. Therefore, the human psyche automatically turns to the connoted message, or the inferred cultural and social references, as a source of truth. Because the viewer is so conditioned by society to interpret the symbols presented here in a certain way, they will ultimately feel a certain way about an advertisement without even realizing anything has happened. This also explains why individuals from different cultures may interpret the same advertisement photograph in completely different ways. The constructed advertisement is only able to successfully convey its point through its use of the constructed ideals of society.  

Digital Exhibitionism: the Digital Graveyard

I found the idea of the internet as a personal hyperlinked scrap book very interesting but some of the points Munar made were almost unsettling. With all the social media options we have available to us, people have the ability to keep an ongoing record of their lives in many different facets, whether it be personal or work related. But what will happen to all this information we are putting out there as we age? It is convenient now to be able to use facebook to recall a photo from last year's summer break; social media has redefined the linear nature of our lives, allowing us to quickly access memories we might have buried. But what will happen to all these records 20 years down the road? Will we simply keep building them larger and larger? It feels as though eventually we will reach a point where too much is too much- there simply is not enough time to constantly reflect on a scrap book that keeps growing bigger and bigger while at the same time trying to live real life in order to make MORE memories to add to that scrapbook. Personally, even though social media has its benefits, I feel that it has created a society of people who aren’t very present in the moment because they are too busy living in the digital past. There will come a time when the digital world is revolutionized once again, but what will become of our scrapbooks? The idea that Munar presented of a sort of digital graveyard is eerie but very possible.

The FSA and the "Migrant Mother"

The fact that the photographer of “Migrant Mother”, Dorothea Lange, was herself a woman, was crucial to the creation of this emotionally charged photograph that has come to be known as an icon of the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration, to which Lange was employed, hired photographers for the purpose of documenting the lives of the rural poor in America. Photographers like Lange, however, took this a step further in capturing the emotional pain and suffering of the subjects depicted in their photographs in order to encourage the viewer to feel a certain sense of sympathy for these “deserving poor”. It has been argued that the fact that Lange was a woman and in touch with her emotional intuition that she was able to form a connection to her subjects that helped to portray them in a deeper way than a straightforward documentary photograph. Her choice of subject matter in “Migrant Mother”- a poor, suffering, lonely mother of young children- was crucial to evoking the sense of sympathy that she desired the viewers to feel.

 Once the FSA had a hold of Lange’s negatives, they had exclusive rights to her photographs and could do essentially whatever they chose to do with them. The FSA used this particular image to such an extent that the woman depicted Florence Thompson, became known by her face all over the country. The ironic thing about the whole situation is that although originally, Lange took the photograph with the idea that it might one day serve to better the life of the migrant mother, Thompson publically admitted that “she had never made a penny out of it and it had done her no good”.

The Voyeuristic Gaze

Because of it’s nature of appearing as though it is a fragment of a whole, in addition to the constantly present gaze of the photographer, photography is the perfect medium in which to perpetuate the hegemonic concepts that society holds on gender and gender roles, as well as the female body. Photography serves to emphasize the “voyeuristic gaze” in that the gaze of the photographer is unavoidable and easily picked up on. When the gaze is emphasized in a picture of the female body, she is demoted to a passive object, meant only for the viewer’s pleasure. The “cut” nature of a photograph further serves to objectify a pictured female body in that she is visually reduced to the sum of her parts. The advertisement photographer often chooses to only represent a piece of the woman- her identity as a person is no longer important.

The ways in which women are represented in advertisement photography reflects constructs already dominant in society, but unfortunately, it also perpetuates them. Women are presented with these images along with the idea that this is what a properly feminine woman “should” look like. The images the media presents us with are artificially constructed, and impossible to replicate in real life. It seems to be widespread knowledge that the images of the media are fake, yet we all continue to strive for this impossible standard. The creators of these images know how to use the connotation of the image to trick the viewer into believing that to look the way these digitally altered models look is not only possible, but necessary in order to be well-liked, happy, and successful. It sickens me to think that these masterminds create ads to knowingly manipulate women with low self-confidence and even go so far as to promote eating disorders. Clearly, when put in the wrong hands, photography can be a deadly weapon.      

"Photography, Art, and Modernity": What is the "modern" photograph?

One point made by Nesbitt in her article “Photography, Art, and Modernity” that I found thought provoking was the idea that advertising, in a sense, enabled the creation of the link between avant-garde painting and photography. Prior to the beginnings of avant-garde photography, photographs were seen mainly as documents in that they were used primarily by the mass media to advertise and update the public on the most current events. Because the avant-garde aimed to shock the already rapidly modernizing culture, they were presented with the task of presenting the public with even more current ideas than the technologically advanced images that the media had familiarized them with. Avant-garde photography was formed through its opposition to the mass media produced photo-document, but in its opposition it actually embraced the technicality and mechanic qualities found in these photographs and pushed them to a new extreme. Although photography as a medium wasn’t as wholly embraced in the world of avant-garde as painting, it shared the same philosophical basis of its opposition to the mass media. The avant-garde photograph did not try and mimic the qualities already found in avant-garde painting, but instead emphasized and criticized the qualities found in the type of photography that was, at the time, deemed the most “modern”- the document.