Presentation 1: The Global Image – A Worldwide Medium

Do you see parallels between the historic spread of photography and the transmission of digital imagery today?

Yes, generational shifts in technology also serve to perpetuate this. For example, the introduction of the iPhone has had a fundamental impact on the transmission of imagery.^​†​ After reading ‘Photography Changes Everything’ this week, Heiferman writes ‘We need, use, and respond to photographs in their myriad forms for all sorts of reasons’.^​‡​ The transmission of digital imagery today could be considered part of our throwaway, scrolling culture, that has developed through the proliferation of the internet, whereas at the beginning of photography, it was considered and used as a literal record of reality, used as record.^​§​ It feels that today, the currency of the internet is in imagery, distributed with a disregard to any real impact that the image might have to the point that the images start to cut away any of the controversial and niche elements that may have and be funnelled into a more generic image, which we are starting to see on sites such as instagram.^​¶​ The same arguments, it seems, were being directed at ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition (Fig.1), where the resulting images did not necessarily challenge, and when they were, a concession was made.^​#​ In a sense the spread of photography could be viewed as cyclical.

Are there problems associated with the speed at which the photography moves?

Now we have reached a point where the photographic image is so ubiquitous that it discarded almost as soon as it is created, through the medium of Snapchat and Instagram Story features. Photographs start to lose their value.

Presentation 2: The Global Image – Windows On The World

What do you make of the mirror and window analogy? As a practitioner do you identify more closely with one or the other?

“in metaphorical terms the photograph is seen as either
a mirror, a romantic expression of the photographer’s sensibility as it projects itself onto the things and sights of this world, or as a window through which the exterior world is explored in all its presence and reality”^​**​

Something that I have never really considered as a photographer, however for ‘The View Through your Window’ task, it was the ‘Mirror’ that I naturally gravitated to. That said, I have always been interested in how the viewfinder crops and as a photographer you make conscious, sometimes unconscious choices on what to omit from the final image. Editing out the less than aesthetic elements of a scene.

Presentation 3: The Global Image – Unity and Change

Do you think the power and influence of the photograph is overstated? If so, does this devalue the true extent of the role of the photography in bringing about change or is the power of photography as advocacy in fact understated?

The photograph may very well be supplemented by other media, such as video. However, I think that, in the examples given during this presentation, it is the image that remains ingrained on our collective psyche, and it is the still image that forms the reference point for the discussion.

What photographs or bodies of work come to mind when you think of those that have inspired unity and change?

Alice Seeley Harris’s^​‡‡​ images of the congo are widely regarded as one of the first Humanitarian photography projects and contributed to the end of Slavery in the Belgian Congo. However, a Critique of this work in ‘Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time’^​§§​ notes that the images were presented, in part, as an ideological choice between Belgian Catholicism, and British Imperialism, with a white European gaze.

Don McCullin’s vast work as a conflict photographer includes many images that have become iconic of the genre. His recent retrospective exhibition^​##​ at Tate Britain was critically reviewed by Lewis bush who noted his re-positioning as an ‘Artist’ and that his work had begun to move away from the original intention, meaning and context in which much of it was produced.^​***​