Society of the Spectacle and War Photography

Society of the Spectacle and struggle PhotographyDiscuss contemporary struggle snapy in likeness to Debords exit on the Society of the Spectacle.Society of the Spectacle written by cat-o-nine-tails Debord and published in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam struggle argues that the world has been overtaken by the nonion of spectacle. Debord describes what the spectacle comprises of (in several numbered paragraphs) he says that, In societies dominated by innovative conditions of production, bearing is pre directed as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly blisteringd has receded into a theatrical per produceance. (1) Debord is stating that life in the raw age has become fixated on genuinelyity as re familiariseation (i.e. by the media) real life experiences kick in been substituted for experiences that ar digitally lived. Debord goes on to say that the spectacle presents itself simultaneously as inn, itself as part of society, and as means of unification. As part of society, it is the focal point of all stack and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness the unification it achieves is vigor but an official language of universal separationthe spectacle is non a collection of images it is a social relation between commonwealth talk terms by images. (3-4) With the rise of new media and the explosion of 24-hour intelligence service and reality television, it would search that the followence of the spectacle becomes self-evident. Mass amounts of human existences be directed to gaze at what has become a global common culture, news and entertainment.For Debord, the spectacle is a light beam of pacification and depoliticization it is a permanent Opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisf put through with a survival that expands jibe to its feature laws the spectacle distra cts from the roughly urgent task of real life. (44) Debord argues, our sense of reality is vigor more than than an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once lived becomes perfect representation . Debords theory of the sectacle is similar to that of Baudrillards theories which concentrate on the ideas of a hyperreality. He considered a fool a sort to be a replacement for the real object. The lines of reality and non-reality wipe extinct become so blurred in our society that a photograph can replace the real. Like Debord Baudrillards believed we live in a liaise reality, which prefers the symbol of reality earlier than the thing itself.We atomic number 18 constantly bombarded with images form great deal media that our own lives are own reality becomes entwined with the images we discern. The boundary that should exist between reality and fantasy is erased. A consequence of the age we live in. Images turn ining the gruesome nature of war are constantly usable on television and in newspapers and magazines every page turned reveals a new atrocity. We have been flooded with these images for so long that they no interminable have an affect on us, instead on inspiring empathy and munificence we are more passive to them a feeling of indifference. In the quite a little media if there is a story about celebrities or life style it would defeat gruesome photographs of war.As a society weve nigh grown disposed to these types of images, seeing them everyday. In an essay entitled Photographs of Agony John Berger as well argues that society has become repellent to images represent wo(e) saying that In the last year or so, it has become normal for certain mass circulation newspapers to publish war photographs which earlier would have been suppressed as being too shocking. One capability explain this development by inclination that these newspapers have to come to realise that a large section of their readers are straight aware of the hor rors of war and want to be shown the truth. Alternatively, one magnate argue that these newspapers believe that their readers have become inured to uncivilised images and so immediately compete in terms of ever more violent sensationalism. (ed Wells L, The Phtotgraphy Reader, chapter 27)Berger is questioning the effectiveness of the violent or shocking war photograph arguing that maybe the public have become immune to images of horror and the newspapers are competing to show ever more horrific images in order to gain pubic attention. We liveliness near us and see a world beyond our ascendance. Relying on advanced technologies to conduct war and to replicate it on film and TV has diminished our ability to come across between reality and entertainment, turning our experience of war into a mere spectacle.In regarding the disturb of others Susan Sontag Describes societies attraction to violent images Everyone knows that what slows down highway job going past a horrendous car cr ash is not only curiosity. It is also for many, the wish to see something gruesome there does depend to be a modern need fro the consumption of images of suffering. And this abundant supplement of imagery has dulled our senses and created a new syndrome of communal inaction, we look around us and see a world beyond our control, which is what Debord was descri hive awayg in society of the spectacle. In her early book On Photography Susan Sontag writes that War and picture taking now seen insperable (pg167) and as war evolves and continues so has the lensmans response to the effects of conflict.The big large-format cameras of the 19th century prevented the graduation exercise war photographers such as roger Fenton from capturing the action of combat instead their photographs concentrated on the by and bymath of the battlefields. With the technological nestle of cameras and not needing to haul darkroom equipment with them the first world war photographer could defecate blott or to combat and then during the 2nd world war the launching of the 35mm camera increased the intimacy of the cameras eye, enabling photographers to become part of the action, in a way the first exponents in the 19 century could neer have dreamed. During the Vietnam war photographs could now been seen within days of them being taken, the imperativeness making the images relevant and challenging the inevitability of war the masser was now feeling at something which is part of the present, and which carries over to the future. For a century and a half the camera has been witness to events that have shaped and shocked the world, capturing these images forever. We might now live in a world of multi channel television, 24-hour news coverage and instant his on the Internet, but it is the liquid image that provides the most powerful record of our history, good and bad. The still image bes to hold so much power over us, they last, television is passing and goes by quickly, picture t aking lasts, imprinted on paper and in the mind.War and the effects of warfare have always been explored throughout history in literature, poetry, art, film and picture taking. Before the first world war the depiction of battles by artists were often of soldiers and generals depicted as heroes, in their uniforms adorned with medals but during the first world war when artists were sent to the front line to record the scene, what they saw there defied their imagination. It soon became fall out that the traditional painting couldnt capture the full horror of warfare. The modernist painters began to look at the universal grimness of war, the harsh reality of the world and miscellaneous not what they saw but what they matte up. For example the artists Paul Nash who served as a solider, envisioned the battlefield in a painting titked Menin Road in 1919, what he depicted was the aftermath of war, a loose scene of an almost outsider world the surreal colours a purple patrician turn over the mutilated bare trees, bursts of smoke rising from the debris strewn ground and blue light filtering through the clouds completely empty apart from four lonely(a) figures in the background. Nash wanted rob warfare of its last shred of atmosphere and its last shine of glamour.Francisco Goyas serial of etchings Disasters of War depicts the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 during which French soldiers brutally tortured the Spanish peasants and the Spanish responded with their own acts of cruelty. The piss were withdrawn and withheld from publication during Goyas lifetime beca ingestion of their controversial and disturbing qualities. Susan Sontag writes of Goyas etchings in Regarding the Pain of others, Goyas art seems a turning point in the history of moralistic feelings and of sorrow-as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art Goya was witness to these events during the war, but the etchings depict imagined scenes of the atrocities of violence where the lines between real events and imagined ones blur creating a unique reality that is complimentary yet straightforward from the historical realities of war. As the smasher is not lead to believe the images are exact reproduction of actual events the effect is one of a unbiased meditation on the terrifying potential that resides in all humans. The images dont say who the people are-the soldiers could be French or Spanish, the dead tortured bodies could be those of civilians or soldiers giving the viewer a more open indication bringing images to life in a way that plug into to individualized experience. Goyas images are constantly being revisited looking at Francis Bacon triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944 the twisted screaming distorted creatures depict mans inhumanity to man and capture the fear of the future mood after the second world war and still our mood today, bacon like Goya still has a hold over our imagination, for example the Chapman brothers reconstructed the Disasters of war in 1991 using miniature plastic figurines. Painting and sculpture are understandably viewed as interpretations of the effect and consequences of war, with photography the assumptions is that images are seen as a register they appear real, even when we know photographs can be faked and subject to the photographers view of events.In On Photography Susan Sontag wrote War and photography now seem inseparable. In On Photography Sontag explains what she saw as the sad separate of a society that lived at a more and more voyeuristic di military posture to the first hand experience of reality. In accordance with this Sontag describes the photographers whose in-person concern was apparently with finding out and understanding, were doing no more than fit the human thirst for sensation and driving this to extremes by ever more sensational images, until ultimately all feeling was lost. In the book The photograph as contemporary artdescribes the contemporary war photographer The use of medium-and large-format cameras (as opposed to 35mm format), not normally seen at the sites of war and human disaster-not at least, since the mid-nineteenth century-has become a sign that a new breed of photographer is framing the social world in a measured and reflective manner She goes on to sayThe subject matter has been different, too kinda than being caught up in the midst of an event, or at close quarters to individual pain and suffering, photogrphers choose to represent what is left nates in the wake of such tradegies, often doing so with style that propses aqualifying pperspective. It is egest to Contemporary war photographers have in the main taken anti-reportage stance slowing down image making, remaining out of the hub of action, and arriving after the crucial moment to allow the viewer a more contemplative look at war and the effects of war.Using Photomontage Martha Rosler infiltrates our comfort zones and reveals the dangers involved in an illusionary distance often created by the mass media between war and ourselves. By using images from magazines of advertisements combined with military images of soldiers and weaponry she transforms the notion of the guard of a home into one under assault. Her intent is to project the flagellum and atrocity of war into the comfortable place in which we live. She employs devices that work against the seduction of advertising and consumer imagery, the process of photomontage allows her to expose the gaps between image and reality, and ultimately grant the viewer aware of an out of place presence. She addresses the impact of the mass media who according to Debord profess the images of horror seem mundane and remote by pointing out the implicit presence of militarism in our daily lives, by juxtaposing popular lifestyle magazine images with stark images of war.The French Photographer Sophie Ristelhuber Photo graphs depicts the aftermath of war they are usually un peopled with no survivors and no dead, concentrating on the spaces of war rather than its participants, the scars and burns are found on buildings and landscapes rather then the people. Her photographs of the Kuwaiti desert, entitled Fait were made shortly after the end of the first disjunction War. Many of the photographs from this series were taken from a ariel viewpoint This elevated fish creates a distorted abstract view of trenches, tank tracts, bomb craters, blazing oil wells and battlefield detritus. You have to look carefully and nearly at the photographs to discover that the lines and tracts objects engulfed by the sand are the results of war scarring the landscape emphasising how vast and sprawling the effects of war can be. Sophie Ristelhueber describes the effects of shield and perspective in her work.The constant shift between the incessantly big and the infinitely small may disorientate the spectator. But it s a good illustration of our relationship with the world We have at our disposition modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet in fact we see nothing. Ristelhueber tardily won the Deutsch Borse Photography prize 2010, which included set of images titled football team blowups, a series of images of huge craters made by bombs In capital of Lebanon and Iraq, again the y describes the devastation war leaves behind both on the earth and the body.Paul Seawright photographs the traces of destruction that war leaves behind in a place The solitary places in Seawrights photographs seem to be concealing something they deal the viewer to look beneath the surface of the image the disjunct severe areas reveal hollows where mines have been cleared or left unexploded, or the insidious rubble of military debris strewn across the desert landscape. The quiet tint and blankness of the desert distances them from the spectacle associated with the medias representation of war, there is an unknown tension in the images Seawright generates a view of the futility of war. One of his photographs is almost identical to that of Fentons photograph of the Crimean war depicting empty cannon balls in a valley illustrating the fact that patronage its technological advancements war is fundamentally always the same. In his book privy Seawright says that he has always been fascinated by the invisible, the unseen, the subject that doesnt easily present itself to the camera.Landlands And toll were commissioned in 2002 by the imperial war museum to make an artwork in response to a two-week visit to Afghanistan and what they experienced there. Landlands and bells work characteristically focuses on the interconnected relationships linking people and architecture. They say were totally meet by architecture. It is the most tangible record of the way we live because it describes how we relate to socially, culturally and politically. It is the most persistent of the way we live-our aspirations and beliefs.The result was among other television receiver based works The House of Bin pixilated. Presented as an interactive part similar to a video peppy the viewer is in control via a joystick to explore a reconstruction of Osama Bin ladeneds barren hilltop bunker. The viewer can virtually travel through a bleak set of derelict houses, surrounded by burnt-out cars and debris. Langlands and Bell took thousands of photographs of the house near Jalalabad, The eerie interactive digital exploration of Osama bin Ladens house offers an unsettling experience, and engages with the viewer in a totally new way regarding war photography. The houses surprisingly small and basic. Piles of blankets and clothes are strewn in the rooms elsewhere a single string bed is isolated in a dark corner. Outside there is a series of strangely constructed bunkers and a small mosque. Being in control of looking at the work almost feels like observing a evil scene. The building s and grounds are absent of any human presence impression signs of people who were once there are constant, although the elusive bin Laden is nowhere to be seen, his presence can still be felt in this mesmerizing and ancient environment. It brings us disturbingly close to him, even as it emphasizes his continuing ability to evade capture. The House of Bin Laden becomes a metaphor for the elusive presence Bin Laden maintains by the very fact of his disappearance.By presenting this piece as an interactive game like simulation Langlands and Bell are actively engaging in the idea of the spectacle by using what is essentially and entertainment based media and allowing the viewer to control their viewer using a joystick, it could be argued that by combing entertainment and unreality with real life situations speaks more to a genesis obsessed with mass media. They do not attempt to make the 3d environments look realistic like the photographs they took instead it looks constructed exactl y as a ready reckoner game would look, angular and flat. I personally experienced this work when I saw the Turner Prize in 2004, and it is clear that their intent was for this piece to be viewed and experienced like a computer game. risky warfare is sold as entertainment in the form of computer games whose manufactures claim to make them as realistic as possible. Thus reflecting modern societies engagement with entertainment as opposed to real life issues. in that respect seems to be a move in contemporary war photography to a more contemplative and abstract approach, maybe this is as Debord describes because we are use to the violence and horrors the spectacle of war presented in the media, and have become almost immune and unmoved by these images. we can never experience the admittedly horrors of war unless from first hand experience but photographers seem now to be taking the stance of the modernist painters of the first world war who painted what they felt rather than what t hey saw. Contemporary photographers are interpreting these events rather than documenting them, in a way that enables the viewer a more contemplative approach to the contemporary war photograph.