"reflections" deadline

Ok, after having figured out your schedule, the deadline for this exercise is 10pm Thurs 30th Oct'08. After this, there is one more exercise I want you to do while you are on your field trip. Something that will link up and hopefully help shape your final film. Cheers! Enjoy your much-needed break and have a great Diwali! - Ajay

introducing our guest reviewer

Chetana Deorah
is a Graphic Designer with over 9 years’ experience in Print and Web User Interface Design. She graduated from the Sophia Polytechnic with a BFA in Commercial Art.
Her award-winning portfolio and thesis project on the visual interpretation of Poetry earned her an MFA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco. She has won numerous web awards for clients such as Stanford University and Puretech Internet! Chetana is based in the San Francisco bay area working as a Senior Visual Designer at Yahoo! Inc.

apologies!

hey guys,

Just to say a big sorry that I have not uploaded the comments, observations and grading that my graphic designer friend has made. Also, those of you who have emailed the exercise, try and upload them again onto the blog. Am out till this weekend and will post the comments on Sunday 5th Sept. Thanks! - Ajay

something i'd like you to read

The Uses and Misuses of Photographs
By Sadanand Menon


Monday, September 22 was an extraordinary day in the annals the Indian media. I would like to call it a day of shame. For, on that day, our media collectively displayed its herd-like mentality and its entirely uncritical attitude to the use – and misuse – of the photographs it publishes.

At least eight mainstream English language newspapers (including The Times of India, The Indian and The New Indian Express, The Hindu, the Hindustan Times, The Deccan Chronicle) and many more in the language press from North to South and East to West, uncritically published almost identical photographs on their front pages. The photographs were not generated by any single agency. They were neither taken by ‘citizen’ photographers nor were they official handouts. They were shots by individual staff photographers as well as professional syndicated photographers. What is amazing is what newsrooms across the country chose to do with the image.

The photographs were of three suspects involved in the Delhi blasts, who were arrested from their residence in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar. Reports also claimed they were students of the Jamia Milia Islamia. What was fishy about the photographs was that they showed three totally unidentifiable people, their head and face completely swathed in generous length of cloth, flanked by gun-toting policemen in mufti and other hangers-on. Yet it seemed obvious that this was a photo-op provided to the media – not to protect anyone’s identity – but to precisely create a definite sense of identity.

For all the three suspects, to mask their identity, were tricked up by the local police in identical ‘Palestinian Rumaals’ or kaffiyehs or abayas or cassavas as this piece of head-dress is variously known. Though none of their faces were visible, to any casual reader of the newspapers it would be abundantly clear that they were of ‘Arab’, ‘West Asian’ or ‘Islamic’ origin. A clear case of racial profiling!

Some sceptical comments about this on the net, primarily generated by documentary film maker Yousuf Sayeed who lives in the same area, led to a small critical piece in The Hindustan Times two days later, raising critical questions. The sceptics wondered how it came about that the three arrested suspects came to be in possession of identical, brand new rumaals, which they could readily pull out of their pockets to cover their faces. As if, upon realising they might be arrested soon, they went shopping and bought identical scarves, so that everyone will recognise them as ‘Islamic terrorists’. Critics pointed out that usually suspects arrested on various charges mask their faces with their own handkerchiefs or borrow towels or black cloth to hood their faces; never before had it seemed like such a costume drama as the Delhi police had managed to stage.

Then came the stunning revelation by the Delhi police commissioner. He confessed that it was his department which had dressed up the suspects in such a suggestive manner and, even more alarmingly, that the Delhi police had purchased these pieces of cloth “in bulk” for use by those arrested. Obviously, every arrested person could now be given a suggestive ‘Islamic terrorist’ look, thereby setting up dangerous subliminal propaganda within the media.

Repulsive as it is, most people will agree that the Police and its dirty-tricks department are not beyond using such obnoxious methods. What is beyond explanation is how the media collectively fell into this trap and carried these images without a single question mark or doubt about what they so readily display on their front pages.

For those not used to thinking about these things, the question can be framed a little differently. It has to do with conceptual issues related to the use (or misuse) of the image in the media. On any given day, hundreds of thousands of photographs are clicked. Of these, by common consensus, and governed by a largely abstract logic dealing with the received wisdom of ‘news-value’ or ‘news-worthiness’, about five hundred to a thousand pictures might be considered for use within the media. After that, it is quite chancy or dependent on strong editorial choices why a photograph makes it to the papers, in particular the front page.

The front page photo, in the world of the print media, is usually associated with an iconic status. It is supposed be a quick encapsulation of what a paper or a region or a nation or a civilisation imagines as its primary concern. It frames the news of the day with a kind of visual evidence or back-up which then illustrates how it wants to set up the communication and how it wants the readers to enter the narrative.

Very seldom, across 365 days in a year, do we find identical images on the front page. That is supposed to be the greatness and the strength of democratic media practice that editorial position and interpretation of events can vary. It is also part of the notion of healthy competition in the media that variety, diversity and contrariness are seen as virtues – that a news item or image which is used sycophantically by one section of the press, can as easily be used critically by another section of the same press.

That is why, when you come across a substantial section of the national press use just one common image on their front page, and that too without an critical remarks or interrogative comments, one begins to smell the operation of ‘ideology’, which is nothing but a blind acceptance of certain ‘ruling’ ideas of a class or of a moment – ideas that indicate the power structures within which ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ are manufactured.

To me it is shattering, that on the evening of September 21, across the newsrooms of the best of Indian newspapers, not one editorial discussion chose to evaluate the photograph of the three arrested youngsters draped in checked cloth and use their judgement to ‘read’ the picture in a dispassionate manner worthy of a free press. Instead the Indian media collectively behaved as they had not even during the period of the Emergency and its draconian censorship. They all fell prey to their own sense of prejudice and communal mindset. The Nazi propaganda machine could not have expected to produce better results.

Obviously, Indian media needs to re-investigate the ‘frame’ within which it is presenting, colouring and analysing news. Such evidence of a collective cop-out is a serious failing, which it needs to critically examine and carry out correctives. In fact, this is a fit case for being taken before the Press Council.

Shame, a little shame is all that the media needs. For shame as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.

LABELS!

Guys, many of you my find this highly annoying... It's almost the end of the first term, and we've completed a billion assignments for this blog (well, ok.. maybe not a billion, but quite a few). I hope we've reached a stage where we all can LABEL our posts correctly? The label for this assignment is 'contrast', something that Ajay mentioned earlier. JUST 'contrast'...

Anyhoo! :)

Cheers to our good photographs.. There is hope! :)

Sruti

Etc... (Monica)

Ex#5 Contrast New Deadline

I have one more class with you on monday 22nd Sept 8.15am. I'd like to see your photos before that. So, the new deadline is Sunday 21st 10pm. I am saying it again - if you cannot and don't want to do it, please don't...but DO NOT post unthought-out, rush jobs. Thanks and see you! - Ajay

She and I - Ajay's overall observations

I have finally posted my comments on each of your submissions... but, it's been a nose dive after the excellent start with the letters and self-portraits. 90% of the photographs posted lacked any thought and were indicative of the amount of time spent (lack of it) on the exercise. These were NOT meant to be your usual "hey! take a picture of me" kind of photos you take everyday.  If you are not interested in doing an exercise, please don't do it and DO NOT post it.

You guys had just about begun to dig beneath the surface with your self-portraits and lost the chance to really explore how it is that you'd like to be seen. Save two sets of learning partners. Pathetic! And as a class, you have presented such pedestrian fare - settling for the most obvious, easy and uninteresting poses.

Even in the self-portrait exercise, just two of you tried something other than your mug-shot! That is how narrow and cliched your thinking is. If you don't try things here and now, I wonder when will you ever do it. Or then, I will simply dismiss you off as a really dull batch.

Or, would you put more effort and take it seriously if I were to mark you on these exercises?

Also, I had asked earlier about anonymous comments. No one replied. I have decided that you can only post comments WITH your names. From now on, I will delete anonymous comments. 

No more "self-portraits"!

For those who have not yet posted their "self portrait", you are late and so please do not post any. For those, whom I have asked to do more, you can continue posting.

I see only a few of you who have posted comments on other people's photographs. But I hope you are at least seeing all the self-portraits.

Will someone get Radhika to select her "fav five" self-portraits and post her results. Thanks - Ajay

PS: Looking forward to seeing the "she and i" photographs.

Calling Radz

After her rating of Susan's "take two", I am going to ask her to select her favourite five self-portraits and post her results. Over to you, Radz - Ajay

thought...borrowed!

"We see only what we look at. 

To look is an act of choice. 

We are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves.

After we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen - the reciprocal nature of vision.

Our perception of an image depends on our own way of seeing."

- John Berger, Ways Of Seeing

Suggestion

Guys.. This is just a proposition..
But it's so much easier to document our work if we just add a common label for each assignments. For example, for the second assignment, Ajay has labeled his post 'me: then and now.'
If we could just label our posts the same, it's easier for us to keep track of all of our work till date.
If you add that label, you can view your posts under the title Next Assignment Due... or whatever Ajay titles it, or the first one of us to submit that assignment.

Anyhoo!
Off for the night..
Cheers!