[Reader-list] (no subject)

[sou dhamini]

This is in response to Ananya Vajpaye's  article which I found very packed. I  feel the need to unwrap it for myself before I can interact. Do bear with the shearing. I am a film-maker and a current Sarai fellow. 

A photograph of a war criminal undergoing trial, draws a researcher to look ‘behind’ the picture and catch history direct. She is inundated  with more details and nuances than the photo held. The colours of the courtroom. The body language of the criminal still at large. Her own subjectivities. At the same time, she is made aware of the privileged access a celebrity photographer gets to his subject, which is denied her as an anonymous researcher. She also hones in to the particular form of historical discourse the still photo was engaged in. For among the myriad possible angles of framing open to him, the photographer  had chosen to frame it as quotation – linking this event to an earlier war crime  and this photograph to a nascent genre of war and justice documentation. 

Interesting.

But for someone  who works more with images than with words, and hence looking at it from the other side so to speak, a question that is equally interesting  is how conscious we are  of words as a – mere – representation system. Despite the point and shoot camera and handycam, image making  is still shrouded in the mystique of technology and hence overtly  suspect. While the  means  of  production  of  words, including  the formal academic word and  informal reader-speech, is  more familiar  -  hence  more deceptive, in their relation to reality. Or so it seems to me.  All  we can do  I think  is  to  become  aware  of different   
‘frames’ including our subjectivities and the  constraints-privileges they entail. The self-reflexive - as critical tool not gimmick - is possibly  the only mode of speech available today, in any register. 

Comments?







-- 
_______________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10