Free from images….

4 thoughts on “Free from images….”

• Thanks Andrea, so interesting. I recently went to a lecture in my daughter’s primary school about learning to read. They gave us a mock book made up of a code and some pictures and told us to ‘work out the story’. It was interesting how much we depended on the pictures to make up what we thought the book was about (to varying degrees of success!). So in that case obviously the words were subjugated by the pictures and we drew our own (multi faceted) conclusions. But often I think, in our image saturated world, the images are subjugated or fixed by the text so the interpretation of the image is very limited. The caption, the news headline etc all tell us what to see in the picture. I think what is interesting about this article is that they are freeing the (non) images from being too anchored and allowing the image to form in the mind of the reader. I believe John Umney will have something to say on this…! It’s funny how they included the flat plans at the back – they just couldn’t bring themselves to drop the image entirely!

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  • Good to hear your views Sharon. I felt the same about the flat plans at the back.
    Back in a previous role I taught media studies (please don’t all boo me!) and anchorage was a key concept. I had a great teaching aid where I took the same photograph and placed it many different contexts to show how the meaning changed. Simple but effective.

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• Well, there is so much to say! It was a “tweet” that brought me the news that Liberation had just published an edition without photographs, and I had reflected on that news when I listened to Dr. Alexandra Moschovi’s lecture at the excellent study visit at the University of Westminster on Saturday. Moschivi’s talk dwelt on the further democratization of the process and means of photography, how in Google’s Glass’ terms it will free up new layers of creativity whilst also acknowledging the audiences concern about security, about how necessarily the users of these devices will become ever more interconnected. And whilst I found her talk very interesting I wondered about how the future of photojournalism might be looking like sooner, rather than later. Recently ‘The Chicago Sun Times’ rather infamously sacked all their photographers saying that their reporters could all use iPhones, and it has also been a policy for some time to ‘plant’ cameras, maybe even mobile ‘phones, in areas of conflict as a way to gather image content via ‘citizen-journalists’. How long before ‘The Chicago Sun’ issues Google Glass to citizen hacks in Kabul or Islamabad? They will be on release this coming spring, geo-tagged imagery on the front line, disseminating the news faster than McCullin could rewind a roll of film?
  So, what of ‘Liberation’s’ decision to not print images, but to leave them blank? Of course this newspaper exists in a capitalist economy, so it could simply be a marketing ploy, but I wonder if it might also be a critique on photography? The newspaper needs advertisers, simply relying on the cover price would have had all newspapers bankrupt long since, many of the papers in the UK have been running at a loss for most of their existence, press barons kept them going through the self interest of political influence. The advent of the web has changed all of that, a web presence is now as important, if not more important, to papers like the ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Mail’ to keep the advertisers on board – pay per view of newsprint hasn’t yet become an accepted norm. Image-makers whose work was funded by the press have always been used to eroticize the viewer, the text sometimes taking second place to the image, which captures attention, providing an opportunity to promote and sell the viewer to the advertisers. These images – and their makers – have become complicit in this arrangement and have competed with one another to provide more and more compelling and disturbing imagery. It is only now that the margins of production have reduced to an extent that the photographers have been cut out of the ‘food chain’ leaving a void to be filled. Is that what Liberation was referring to?
  If the means of image provision is left to the ‘citizen’ via social networking with geo-tagged capture we will certainly be sold the story as it happened but most likely devoid of context, there will be no demand to provide any discourse of why what happened happened – the veracity of the image is not questioned – it being on the street to record the event that has just occurred. And like me the world will receive the image mediated via Twitter’ or some other social network, with all the perils that implies.
  Leaving the newsprint space devoid of the image impels the viewer to create an image for themself using text as the anchor. Without discussing the work that I’ve done on removing the image and replacing it with a fictional textual narrative, my suggestion is that the interpretive narrative that the viewer brings of their own volition is as likely to be close to any sense of vérité as it would be with either a citizen journalist with “Google Glass’ or an iPhone.

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  • Thanks for the detailed comment. You have picked up on several of the threads that I could have run with on the post. Your comment regarding news photography on the margins of production brings echoes of the classic Benjamin text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.

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