:)

Yes we did.

Hero Pig

This Poem

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

- Jack Gilbert

The (Allegedly) Objective View of the Detective Camera

Here is a little something I recently wrote for my film surveillance class. I like how it turned out, so I decided to post it here. At times it may sound like I'm being a little melodramatic. But only a little.

          Facebook notifications, Tweets from people I pretend like I know, emails informing me that people I use to know have posted pictures of themselves. These are the things that currently distract me, that force my hands to do something that isn’t writing this blog post. But I look; of course I look, whether it’s because of the little notification blip that seems to eat away at a section of my brain until I check it. Or maybe it’s because everyone in these pictures, and I mean everyone, looks happy, seems like their enjoying life as they do fun and interesting things. Statuses are distracting, but the images are the worst, for they eat up my time like a Vegas slot machine eats quarters; minutes becomes hours, hours become evenings, and finally I leave in a slightly dazed (maybe drunk?) state. Why do I do this? Because these photos are proof, evidence of a skewed reality that is always better than the one we were given. The detective camera referenced in Phenomenologies of the Surface: Radiation-Body-Image by Akira Mizuta Lippit is key to the current state of reality, one that, in creating a business around objectivity, has transcended fact for fiction.

            About halfway through the chapter, Mizuta tells the story of a comedy short from 1908, entitled Bobby’s Kodak. In this short, Bobby receives a camera from his father and starts off by taking various family portraits. However, he soon becomes bored with this and craves photos that are unprepared, unforced, real. One can view this event in one of two ways. First, Bobby got bored and wanted to take pictures of seemingly secret events, violating the social contract of photographer and subject. Or instead, one can view these events as the infancy of photojournalism, taking pictures of the places usually overlooked by society. The second view seemed to flourish for the first part of the twentieth century as illustrated by the works of Jacob Riis, Gordon Parks, and Life Magazine. However, in recent years both views have been replaced by an emerging third view. Life Magazine folded in 2007, People Magazine has a circulation of about three and a half million people, and GOOD Magazine recently ran a piece entitled “Where Have All the Photojournalists Gone?” In the past twenty years, we have all moved past the notion of trying to capture the objective. Instead, we now create images, which from their inception, are twisted to present a skewed reality – one which can contain everything from two celebrities in a fake feud, to how awesome your last vacation was, to isn’t my dog more adorable than yours. With the knowledge that any image can now be consumed in mass, people are no longer concerned with photography as an act of documentation. Instead, they crave an image of self-promotion, one that is almost entirely concerned with getting people to like them.

 With the rise of the Internet and social media, as anyone with a camera can now be labeled a reporter, we no longer crave photography. Instead, we crave fiction. The era of looking at photos of another place, another culture, another realm of society entirely alien to our own is gone. In it’s place is an instant feedback loop, one in which we all fret over who will “Like” our photos, who will leave a nice comment, and how many people will see our photos and think that we are living a happy, interesting, full life. Oh, my phone just buzzed. I feel so much better.

113 Photos From A Season