An argument in pictures

Detour-I thought it was important to make way for a strident voice: Sebastião Salgado.

This man forsake his profession as an economist for his camera. He traveled 39 countries for 7 years gathering impressions. This collection of photographs Migrations essays economic squalor across continents that has uprooted millions and caused insufferable damage to humanity.

These images in hues of black and white depict a consciousness of pain with no room for pity. It’s hard to classify them as documentary because they do more than purely witness. In the words of the photographer there is no possibility of detachment, “I think if you just come into it, take your pictures and go, it must be a disaster for you.”

What do these pictures serve? They are speaking for someone, the way I hope to be able to speak to you through this blog.
"The people concerned many times would see me taking photographs," he said of the Sahel project, "and they would say, 'Please, come and photograph my son, photograph me, help me solve this problem.' In the end they come to your camera like they would come to a microphone, they come to speak through your lens."

Speaking about what he hopes to achieve through his photographs in his work Migrations he says: “My big hope is to aid and provoke a debate so that we can discuss the human condition looking from the point of view of displaced peoples around the world. My photographs are like a vector that link what is happening and give the person who does not have the opportunity to go there the possibility to look. I hope that the person who comes into my show and the person who comes out are not quite the same.”


The questions he poses are arresting, "Are we condemned to be largely spectators? Can we affect the course of events? Can we claim 'compassion fatigue' when we show no sign of consumption fatigue?"

Courtesy:

• Official website of Terra: Non-profit organization created by Salgado & his wife.
  
• Interview with the San Francisco Chronicle

Rethink Globalization

Is progress really inevitable? Whose progress is it anyway?
Is Globalization the way to go: or is it a TINA( there is no alternative) perspective?!

Watching You: 2

After getting your feedback and insightful comments, I went about digging some more on this new voyeuristic culture (an act of voyeurism this!). The idea was to seek an alternative explanation.

I figured voyeurism is in a way a democratic power re-appropriation by the masses. In other words, now everyone has the power to see hence the playing field is somehow leveled. Think about the times when certain sections of cities were off limits for certain castes and access to knowledge, education, and scriptures was restricted to certain segments of the population. Foucault, a very famous theorist coined the ‘clinical gaze’, which refers to the power of a physician to know all (think therapists).

Zoom out to current scenario, where public and private spaces are being collapsed in an information explosion and everything can be seen. In this age of media overkill we are all empowered, hence we are all voyeurs.

More:
Ironically, the mainstream embrace of voyeurism comes precisely as many Americans feel their own privacy is in danger, be it from surveillance on the job, marketers on the Net… “These shows are a kind of acting out of the mingled fascination and fear that surrounds this, a way of playing it out in a kind of harmless way."- Article on Times, about Reality TV.

Watching you

At 2 AM after a very long day at work, I sat down to write my first blog entry for Diggin Deeper. But being a compulsive multi-tasker, I got into an argument while chatting on the go. My friend was telling me that I needed to blog personal incidents. All people are voyeurs; they are more interested in other people’s lives, he claimed. But I wasn’t convinced, wasn’t the internet a source of information with a capital I, besides blogs are about opinions?

This incident made me a bit uncomfortable, which lead to some pondering and scribbling.The word ‘Voyeur’ was originally the name of a disorder of watching unsuspecting people for sexual arousal. The negative connotation has stuck with it, so my first reaction like most people was: something must be seriously wrong if we are all turning into voyeurs?

Whether it is watching home videos uploaded on youtube.com, browsing people’s online photo-albums, reading their personal commentaries on blogs, following dramatized life-stories on Reality shows, all around us is an excess of voyeuristic behavior. The TV Show ‘Big Brother’(Big Boss in India) is a classic case, five pan-regional versions of this massively successful reality show are screened in continents all over the world. On Big Brother, a bunch of people agree to be under constant surveillance during their stay at a communal house. They are ousted one by one by popularity votes and the last one in the game wins a prize.

Looks like the vision of Orwell in 1984 has become a reality today!

It’s quite powerful, the feeling of seeing everything and yet it is completely mundane. There is more to this: What does it mean to be a voyeur? Is this desire to sneak a peek something that today’s technologies have afforded us? Is it because we can publish whatever we want that voyeurism is being fed or is it the other way round? Are people living all their desires vicariously through these acts of voyeurism?

Beat this: One of these days I stumbled on a comment on a blog that said:

“I loved taking a peek inside your mind and life.” (!!)

Check out: Cartoons about voyeurs. 514 pictures tagged voyeurism

Diggin what?

Breaking the barriers of discplines, challenging definitions, and ending dogmatic theory-
lets begin by questioning the things that are never questioned.

Like: Why is their a lecture system in colleges? Why does democracy stand apart from communism? Why are we building larger than life brands/companies/organizations?
Why do pop songs sound the same? Why do we have song and dance sequences in Bollywood movies?

Help me dig deeper into culture, science, economics, or politics. Write to me at:ushamnathan at gmail dot com