The growing need for photography… of a particular kind.
26.1.12
En route Taipei - Singapore
After reading the following excerpt in the International Herald Tribune:
“World News
Aid workers rescued in Somalia
U.S. Commandos raced into Somalia on Wednesday to rescue two aid workers, including an American, killing nine of the pirates who had been holding them captive for months. PAGE 3”
SOMALIA
What do you expect to see on Page 3? What does it look like to you? Draw it for me. Is it a semi-automatic? Is it crumbling colonial vestiges of Italian architecture? Is it a pirate hat? Or perhaps it is a very wealthy Somali business man in a suit sipping coffee in a place that is NOT Somalia? Is it a row of stick figures, young boys really, high on power and lawlessness? What do we know beyond the endless kidnapping of foreigners and famine?
I think about Foxconn, its spate of suicides and resulting human catchment nets that line their buildings… then I think of one of the many objects that are assembled and come out of this place: the ubiquitous iPhone that adorns every remotely upwardly mobile tech-sav I come across. I wonder if they know about the nets as they fiddle with their apps.
I think about knowledge and perception. The fluid lines that cross geographic spaces in human exchange.
How do you conceive of the world from a shared wealth of knowledge and no firsthand experience? What is the result of knowledge distributed by current gatekeepers? As our world becomes exponentially complex, at a pace much faster than we can keep up with, how do we ever hope to master an understanding of it and our roles within it? Just as we have the degrees of separation, what are our degrees of impact? Surely less than 6. How do our most inane actions ripple globally to affect in rapid succession, people and environments that we do not see?
What can I do… what can my peers do… to aid in this landslide of what we do not know threatening to sweep us away into a crevasse of routine values and cultural generalizations?
To enhance Perception. To challenge myth and cliche, propagated by commercial media. To address the wide-ranging facets of a singular issue. For surely every issue has now been raised, as photographers wrack their brains to find some new tragedy to bring their lens and opinion to. Unfortunately, those opinions tend to be mere echoes of an already established and broad consensus. Angry visual stabs at the unjust, often clumsy and landing far from the target. There must be a more elegant and effective way to make a record of our ever-growing histories. A carefully measured and well thought-out riposte to an idea, a reason, a question, an answer that breaks through the thick, foggy veil of what we think we already know about ourselves and the world around us.
How did our perception of the world at large become so simplified and homogenized? How did it get to the point where we all want the same things in life without ever really questioning where it came from and why we want it at all?
Blissfully and stupefyingly unaware and detached, we no longer know who farms our food and where our most basic items come from. I’m not even sure whether we particularly care… but then again, how can you care about something that you know nothing of? We are living in an opaque cloud of distribution networks, of physical acquisitions as well as mental ones.
The need for knowledge gleaned from the field is more important than ever, as this mass myopia becomes pandemic in the industrialized world, blinding us to the insidious machinations of corporate interests over human welfare.
Know your world and your place in it. Cast the net wide and bring back the knowledge collected for those unable to see and learn firsthand for themselves.
Parroting and formula is for chumps.
