Return to College...

Caption: Remains of a very special Swedish apple cake from a very special person…
[Sounds like a bloody Tracy Emin caption :-)]

Today I returned to college for the first time after the summer recess… Time to catch up with some administrative stuff and above all meet some of my fellow students again… The day at college concluded with a fascinating and thought provoking research seminar by Julian Stallabrass on the ‘Meaning of Photography in the Vietnam War’. Stallabrass lectures in modern and contemporary art, including political aspects of the globalised contemporary art world, postwar British art, the history of photography and new media art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The content of the lecture was rich in content, thoughts and conclusions… far too rich to summarise here or to attempt to recite parts of it… it would not do justice to this lecture…

However, I would like to focus on one question or rather assertion that Simon Norfolk made at the end… One of the themes of Stallabrass’ lecture was the power of the media in selecting which images to show to a greater public and how this also changed over the course of the war… and how eventually the media also contributed to the end of the war (and the defeat of the US) in the selection of images and reports from Vietnam… Norfolk suggested that – given that the (selective) power of the media has rather increased nowadays – think of the Iraq war – photographers are forced to preserve meaning in their imagery by moving towards the art end of the spectrum…

Norfolk suggested that it was easier to encode messages in more artful images that get exhibited in galleries and museums, leaving also more control with the photographer over the images that get presented… Albeit – according to Norfolk - photographers will then be lambasted for ‘artifying’ and ‘trivialize’ war and atrocities… An interesting thought from someone who should know… especially given Norfolk’s excellent standing, one would think that he has got more control over his images that get published in magazines…