CAT 1: Media SeductionsQuestioning Authenticity

Elizabeth Loshhttp://losh.ucsd.edu

Susan Sontag1933-2004

On Photography (1977) and Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Why the Spanish Civil War?1936-1939

“the first war to be witnessed (‘covered’) in the modern sense: by a corps of professional photographers at the lines of military engagement and in the towns under bombardment, whose work was immediately seen in newspapers and magazines” (21)

“guaranteed the attention of many cameras because they were invested in the meaning of larger struggles” (36)

“seen in a photo album or printed on rough newsprint” (120)

The War’s Literary and Artistic Record

Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso,The Three Guineas Guernica

The Site of an Iconic Image Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” (32-35, 47, 60-61, 120)

David Seymour or “Chim” “Land Distribution Meeting, Extremadura, Spain, 1936”

(Sontag 30-31)

Luis Martin-Cabrera

Testimony and Evidence

Today’s Thesis

Authenticity, for Sontag, becomes just one of the many superficial objections that she dismisses in defending the truth claims of photojournalism. Regarding the Pain of Others is largely a book that presents a series of counterarguments to the broad generalizations of other public intellectuals in contemporary debates about media influence who assert that dramatic images 1) tend not to be authentic, 2) aestheticize suffering, 3) invade the privacy of victims, 4) glorify graphic violence, 5) desensitize the public, or 6) render reality as a spectacle. While Sontag presents nuanced arguments against these detractors, she does so by reading remarkably few precise visual details in the complex images that she cites as evidence.

Immediacy and SynchronicityPulitzer Prize winning photograph by Eddie Adams of “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon”(Sontag 59-60)

Sontag 60

More upsetting is the opportunity to look at people who know that they have been condemned to die: the cache of six thousand photographs taken between 1975 and 1979 at a secret prison in a former high school in Tuol Sleng, a suburb of Phnom Penh, the killing house of more than fourteen thousand Cambodians charged with being either “intellectuals” or “counter-revolutionaries.”

Huỳnh Công Út / Nick Ut (57)Why is there no doubt about authenticity?

What Constitutes a “Staged” PhotographJoe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima (56)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKuym66LIr4

Images of Antietamfrom the studio of Mathew Brady

Alexander Gardner“The home of a Rebel Sharpshooter”

Roman Vishniac

Vishniac’s A Vanished World

John Heartfield

Image alteration under Stalin

Iranian Photoshop

What is more “valid”? (footnote 77)Lee Miller’s Buchenwald Guard

daughter of Leipzig City Council deputy mayor Dr. Lisso lying dead

Margaret Bourke-White

The Faceless DeadGeorge Strock: Buna Beach (70)

The Beautiful PoorSebastião Salgado, Migrations (78-80)

Here is New York(Sontag 27-29)