Shooting Wide Open

Princess Hijab

I first heard about Princess Hijab in a thread on Flickr. Essentially she covers fashion and beauty ads in public displaying the rote half-naked women with a black hijab shape. The main point of the Flickr discussion was the ethical acceptability of defacing public or private property in the name of anti-consumerism. While I personally wouldn’t practice defacement of private property for political purposes, the more I thought about this issue, the more I became convinced that this goes beyond consumerism or body image issues to the more visuals-pertinent use of public space.

When some argued that she should’ve gone through proper channels and bought public ad space instead of defacing existing ads, it became clear to me that this section of the law is pretty corporation-friendly. One individual (or, to be more general, non-profit/commercial entity) with limited financial funds taking out one or two ads against companies with six or seven figure ad budgets plastering every bus stop, bus, billboard, and sidewalk all across the country? Whether you believe this is fair or not, it’s indisputable that moneyed corporations and their ideas, if they can be called that, dominate our culture visually.

There is no comparable action by individual to counter such a mass of visual input, and I have to say I’ve become sympathetic to her way of working even if I also feel for the owners of the properties that she defaces, who have to clean it up.

Maybe there should be a required balance of ads and PSAs in public, just like how a certain number of radio frequencies or TV stations are reserved for non-commercial stations. Even so, it is rather David vs Goliath. I loved Hulu at the very beginning before the bigger advertisers bought in. The ads were all PSAs for good causes. If our public spaces where filled with a different kind of image, would our society would have different values or priorities?

Anthony Karen

I’d been sitting on this post for a long time, but recently, in that same Flickr group, we began discussing Anthony Karen’s photoessay (Aryan Outfitters) on the seamstress who produces robes for the Klan, and some people seemed to think that photos like those are implicitly sympathetic to their subjects. In my mind, anyone familliar with any photojournalism would know that this is not true. Yet there are some people who think that it’s bad to depict the perspective of the morally marginal. But I suppose this goes beyond photography – think Humbert Humbert and Nabokov, or, more recently, exhibitions of propaganda art.

To me, these two issues are tightly related. My theory is that our mass overexposure to advertising is training many of us to read all visuals like ads. If it’s shown, it must be promotion, and our intellectual reaction is to judge whether we want to buy (into) it or not. I don’t think this is happening on a conscious level any more.

Lately I’ve been reading books about art and commerce, as well as on luxury branding, so this problem seems huge to me. Is it? Or do we really develop a true immunity to ads with repeated exposure? I guess the more pointed question is whether consumerism is virtually entirely visuals-driven, and if this means anti-consumerist campaigns should be aimed at changing behavior or at combatting the influx of consumer visuals.

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

In all of these Carr-like articles we are talking about constant new digital stimulation, right? Not simply use of devices to, say, do work. It’s not really so much digital stimulation as stimulation period? If that’s the case it seems as with many things, to come down to an issue of self-control and discipline, whether you can resist the draw of the internet for the sake of your own health or sanity…

Weng Naiqiang

A slim little book I picked up last year at 798 Photo. If you’ve ever see the drawings in elementary Chinese textbooks, some of the scenes Weng documented seem very familiar. I always thought those were idealizations, but from these photos, it looks like plenty were actually enacted.

So sad that this year I won’t be in Beijing to pick up some more stuff…

Ma Hongjie

Fusion: A Found Album

A couple of years ago, someone at KZSU found an album of promo and snapshots, song lists and expenses, from the ’80s, of a cover band called Fusion. I’ve finally gotten some scans up for fun. Take a look for some big hair and tight pants.

One night we stayed with a Native American family and looking around the house and grounds, it was very clear that they were fervently Christian. I was reminded of the chapter of text in The Last Days of Shishmaref about Christian missionaries and the natives of Alaska.

A couple of snaps from the Colorado River area trip in spring. Has anyone ever resisted taking photos in Monument Valley?

The first photo is a corner of a little souvenir stand set up by the Native Americans. There were a lot in the area, and there were no customers at any of them. It was the off season, but it still made me a bit sad.

Earlier in the trip, we met with some folks from Navajo Nation and they reported how retailers buy their blankets and ware for very low prices (ie $30-50, if that) and then sell them in their boutique shops in town and export abroad for a huge mark-up (ie $300 up to four figures). So now the Navajo are thinking of selling direct on the internet. I wish them the best of luck, but I do wonder if it’s a doomed venture, since these wares are the types of things people buy while traveling on vacation, not while sitting at home contemplating purchases. I wonder why they can’t simply charge higher prices of the middlemen, but I suppose when you’re poor, you aren’t in a position to refuse small amounts of money in hopes of a future of larger amounts.

The trip was a real eye-opener. We focused mostly on water issues, but in addition to having traded their Colorado River water rights away for very little (say, one community center) before Las Vegas became what it is today, the native tribes in the Southwest also have to deal with the consequences of having mining operations on their lands – the illnesses, the tailings piles. Recently the EPA declared that they were responsible for their own environmental standards on reservation lands, but essentially this means that the US government is no longer respnsible for enforcing environmental regulations on reservations, and since the tribes don’t have the capacity to do any sort of large scale clean up or enforce the regulations, the real world result is that there’s very little in the way of regulation.

The ruling council seems to be prone to the same porblem that the rest of us have with representation. The politicians don’t really understand the local circumstances. Those who are in power, who have wealth try to protect it for themselves and their progeny.

In a week I’m off to China to see relatives and catch the tail end of the World Expo. I saw this in airports last year and even though the furor has died down, I hold an irrational hope that will I see it again this year.

Technically more in an older tradition of rhyming speech-song than rap (the instrument is, I believe, a handheld castanet-like instrument constructed of two rectangular strips, not a cheesy drum machine), but how can it be taken as anything else by the western world.

As far as I can tell social networking is pretty much all blocked in China still, so this little blog is going on auto again. See you in a bit.

Andrew Hetherington

Just saw this photo over at Jackonary. Awesome.

America in Color from 1939-43

(via LPV)