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We as photographers don’t have to go behind powerful imagery, rather, we have to find ways to take a good image that could be used to generate power.
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Maruthar Gopalan Ramachandran (popularly known as MGR) was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu between 1977 and 1987. But before his famous tenure as a politician began, MGR had already cemented himself in the Tamil imagination through decades of playing the hero-saviour in blockbuster Tamil films, a suite of movies still re-watched with veneration today. Half a century prior to the pervasive social media environment we inhabit today, that turns on an equivalence between image and self, figures like MGR consciously used their star status to convert a fan following into a voter base. In this conversation, Balaji Maheshwar and Karthik Subramanian, two photographers from Tamil Nadu who are both making work exploring MGR’s legacy, open up questions around image worship, image deities and devotees, and the role of cinema in shaping our most intimate memories.
- Keywords: image worship, Jayaram Jayalalitha, Maruthar Gopalan Ramachandran, MGR fan clubs, Tamil cinema
Balaji Maheshwar is a photographer from Chennai. He has been working on his long photography project Dear Cinema, exploring his family’s relationship with cinema and politics for the past three generations. He believes that his photographs are autobiographical in nature and it is in his relationship with the outside world that he is able to understand more about himself.
www.balajimaheshwar.in
Karthik Subramanian lives and works between the real and the imagined. As a child, Karthik travelled frequently from his life in the city to his grandparents in the village, learning to see the world as it moved through the window of a bus or a train. Several years later, when he travelled to photograph the place where the river Ganga joins the Bay of Bengal, the scenes of the shifting land in front of him mixed inseparably with the lingering memories of the landscape through the moving windows. At this slippery edge between water and land began Karthik’s preoccupation with still and moving images; memory and history; the end and the beginning.
www.karthiksubramanian.com
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Photography was key to the regime’s propaganda and one of the most widely used tools to spread the ideals of the New State and of the ‘politics of the spirit’.
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This essay describes an investigation into a family photographic archive that belonged to my grandparents and represent a period in Portugal’s past (1940–1975) scarred by one of the longest dictatorships in history. The research carries out an ‘iconographic’ analysis of the photographs in the family albums and on how these were influenced by the consistent and highly visual propaganda of the New State regime (1933–1974). It demonstrates how the iconography of this visual propaganda embedded itself into the family album, specifically regarding its propaganda strategy and its ideology and politics towards women. Later these findings were explored through performance photography, creating a photographic body of work. Focusing mostly on the figure of my grandmother and exploring pose and gesture, which were subsequently re-performed for the camera. The information contained within the archive images is re-written within the performance images.
- Keywords: archive, dictatorship, photography and performative, visual propaganda, visualization of the role of women
Ana Janeiro holds a PhD from the University of Westminster (2019) and an MA in Photography from KIAD (currently UCA) in Rochester, UK. She studied Fine Arts at the Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon. She has exhibited regularly since mid-2000. The following solo shows are of special note: The Archive is Present, London Gallery West, London, UK (2019); ALBUM, Índia Portuguesa 1951-1961, Laboratório das Artes, Guimarães, Portugal (2010). Recently, she participated in the following group shows: GoaPhoto, Revisiting the Album, Aldona, Goa, Índia, (2019); hyphen- an exposition between art and research, AmbikaP3, London, UK, (2019); Beyond the mirror, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2017/18). She is an Invited Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Media Studies of the Lisbon Polytechnic. She is represented in several art collections.
- Bate, David. 2010. “The Memory of Photography.” Photographies 3 (2): 243–57.
- Carvalheiro, José, and Maria Silveirinha. 2015. “Acting on the Body of the Audience: Dictatorship, Hegemony, and Gender Censorship in Portugal.” Feminist Media Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1028423
- Cova, Anne, and António Costa Pinto. 2002. “Women under Salazar’s Dictatorship.” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 1 (2): 129–46. https://doi.org/10.1386/pjss.1.2.129
- Janeiro Fernandes, Ana. 2019. Gazing at the Family: Archives, Performance and Portuguese Photography (1940-1975). University of Westminster.
- Sontag, Susan. 1980. »Fascinating Fascism.« In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 73–105.
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Unlike in the material world in the social networks techno-capital rules, which places the master and an average human on an equal level.
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The communication power of the social network Instagram is important to address due to its relaxed nature of presenting details from the ordinary lives of individuals. A comparison of the manners in which influencers and politicians represent themselves brings to front a changed dynamic of social power, as it is available online to anyone who can persuade followers to identify with them or to wish to do so in the future. Two ways of identification with an influencer are assumed, namely increasing and decreasing of distance between them and their followers. The text focuses on the latter, where politicians approach the people by showing the banality of their everyday lives. After reviewing the profiles of two Slovenian politicians, a noticeable pattern is that they most often do so with photographs of puppies and kittens.
- Keywords: Instagram, master, pets, political, politics, populists' rhetoric, selfie
Teja Miholič graduated in photography at Visoka šola za storitve in Ljubljana and recently finished her master studies in cinema at the Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse. She is living and working as a director, cinematographer and contemporary artist in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her primary areas of research and creation focus on internet pop culture, gifs and image statics and dynamics. Since 2015 she has been working in Galerija Fotografija gallery.
- Bate, David. 2009. Photography: The Key Concepts. New York: Berg.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7 (1): 14–25.
- Horrowitz, Bruce. 2015. “Puppy vs. Puppy: Tail of Super Bowl Ads.” Usa Today. Available online here.
- Karadimitriou, Achilleas; and Veneti, Anastasia. 2016. Political Selfies: Image Events in the New Media Field. London: Palgrave McMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50456-2_16
- Lindholm, Jenny; Carlson, Tom; and Högväg, Joachim. 2020. “See Me, Like Me! Exploring Viewers’ Visual Attention to and Trait Perceptions of Party Leaders on Instagram.” The International Journal of Press/Politics: 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220937239
- Lorenz, Taylor. 2020. “Michael Bloomberg’s Campaign Suddenly Drops Memes Everywhere.” The New York Times. Available online here.
- Nittono, Hiroshi; Fukushima, Michiko; Yano, Akihiro; and Moriya, Hiroki. 2012. The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0046362.
- Rodina, Elena; and Dligach, Dimitriy. 2018. “Dictator’s Instagram: Personal and Political Narratives in a Chechen Leader’s Social Network.” Caucausus Survey 7 (2): 95–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/23761199.2019.1567145
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The police were more interested in my professional-looking camera and tripod than anything I might actually be photographing, and ascribed to this equipment some magic power that the tourists with their compact point and shoots did not have.
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Throughout its history, photography has been viewed as something imbued with magical qualities, able to detect the supernatural, or capturing a part of the identity of those it depicts. Even in more enlightened times, these beliefs linger, and security personnel and police officers often ascribe to photography an ability to capture and record dangerous levels of detail. In response to a series of encounters with such personnel, I began to travel to locations around the city of London equipped with a camera obscura, which I would then use to draw highly sensitive locations in meticulous detail, inviting a response. The aim was to draw these same security personnel and police officers into a discussion about their fears about photography, and to illustrate that the abilities we often associate with photography are not at all unique to it.
- Keywords: camera obscura, counterterrorism, drawing, public space, security
Lewis Bush works across media and platforms to visualise forms of contemporary power. After studying history and working in international development, he began developing his own projects in 2012. His work has explored issues ranging from the aggressive redevelopment of London to the systemic inequalities of the art world. Recent works include Shadows of the State, which examines the democratic deficit of intelligence gathering, and Trading Zones which focuses on international finance. Bush has written extensively on photography, and since 2011 he has run the Disphotic blog. He has curated exhibitions and is lecturer in documentary photography at London College of Communication.
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The magician-as-artist stands apart from the magician-as-trickster inasmuch as the former’s intention to deceive is plainly acknowledged beforehand, and conclusively reaffirmed in hindsight
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Discovered during a media-archeological investigation into optical illusions, trick photography, and discarded memorabilia, the photo-multigraph technique opened the door to an enchanted world of cloned appearances orbiting in a self-reflective solar system. Shapeshifting into our preferred artistic medium, this turn-of-the-century photographic technique becomes the video-multigraph. It is bizarrely noteworthy that self-isolation would become not only the subject of the piece, but also – due to the unforeseen spread of a recently mutated virus – the prevailing circumstances under which the work was to be completed. In Verfünfungseffekt, we use the medium of video to create a kaleidoscopic portrait-in-motion where the perspective-shifting shards of ego are recorded in a synchronized performance of solipsist intersubjectivity. The video-multigraph allows for the compositing of tiny offsets in time-shifting delays applied to one, or several, of the mirrored selves – shattering the cloned perfection, as well as the conformity, of the multiple presences. This optical illusion necessitates reflection on how media alters our perceptions of time and space; it thereby arouses wonder about our place in existence.
Keywords: Photo-multigraph, fivefold-portrait, mirror photography, video-multigraph, crisis of presence
- Keywords: crisis of presence, fivefold-portrait, mirror photography, Photo-multigraph, video-multigraph
Geska Helena Brečević (born 1975) and Robert Brečević (born 1971) form the artist duo Performing Pictures, founded in 2004. The couple is based in Stockholm, Sweden, and on the island of Rab in Croatia. Performing Pictures’ works center around memory and movement, linking language and moving images in ways that often require a viewer’s response. Their expanding body of video, pinhole camera animations, cinéapparitions, and casual snapshots blurs the lines between media forms, between still and moving images, and between ephemerality and permanence. In 2020, their book A postliminal script and explanatory notes on a film called Dreaming the Memories of Now will be published.
www.performingpictures.se
- De Martino, Ernesto. 1966. Sud e Magia, Milano: Feltrinelli.
- Reichstein, Irving. 2007. “A Multigraph from Montreal.” Photographic Canadiana, [online] 33 (1): 12–17. Available online here.
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Whenever a wall is erected, there will always be “people arisen” to “jump the wall,” that is, to cross over borders. If only by imagining. As though inventing images contributed – a little here, powerfully there – to reinventing our political hopes.
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Zigzagging through personal memory and historical episodes of great consequence – the fall of the Berlin wall, the Romanian revolution and the April 2018 protests in Nicaragua – the essay seeks points of connection between the personal and the political, exploring how the two are intimately and inextricably intertwined. The textual approach can be situated in-between historical analysis and auto-biographical fiction; the aim is to enable multi-layered narratives, and contrasting, conflicting temporalities to co-exist. Illustrative of this intent, Romanian artist Călin Man intervenes upon the more well-known documentary photographs referenced in the text, by conflating them with everyday snapshots from the city of Arad taken at different points along the temporal arc described.
- Keywords: documentary, memory, personal history, photography, revolution, transnationalism
Ileana L. Selejan is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, where she is a part of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, »Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination« (Grant no. 695283), and an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She was previously the Linda Wyatt Gruber ’66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College where she curated the exhibition »Charlotte Brooks at LOOK: 1951-1971«. She received her PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and was granted the 2012–13 Joan and Stanford Alexander Award from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, for her dissertation research in Nicaragua. As an adjunct instructor, she taught in the Photography and Imaging Department at Tisch School of the Arts, and in the Art History Department at NYU, at the Parsons School of Design, and in the Fine Arts Department at West University, Timisoara, Romania.
- Didi-Huberman G. 2016. Soulèvements. With contributions of Nicole Brenez, et. al. Paris: Livres d’Art, Gallimard/Jeu de Paume.
- Pink Floyd. 1973. »Us and Them«. The Dark Side of the Moon.
- Vu magazine 1936. »La Guerre Civile en Espagne.« September 23.
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