What role do photographs play in the creation, strengthening, or subversion of (the images of) the master? Do the photographs (un)wittingly legitimize the power, or do they recast power within the wider social network of signs?
The belief in some sort of special power of photography persists, our continuous investment with mystical qualities making it one of the most enchanted technologies of present day.
Protest visuals are not simply part of representation of events; they are increasingly becoming tools of political mobilization, resistance and even modes of protesting themselves through image-based activism, documentation and archiving projects and more.
While captivating our sight, animals also look back at us as if questioning our very notion of humanity – as if we instinctively understand that we can only look for human-ness via our engagement with the pet, the wild or tamed animal, the beast.
Backdrop always served as a background, a frame, an ideological grid – artistic and scientific – on which the object of interest, desire or investigation itself was superimposed, thus delineating, exposing, accentuating its features.
The affordances of enhanced viewer-made-participant experience, immersed in a composite visuality superimposed over the “real world”, have already begun to inspire.