A Little Creative License...

Spring is officially here, which means it's time for me to come out of hibernation! It's been unusually busy for me at work lately hence the hiatus from blogging, but it definitely feels good to be back at Dolma :)

For my first post after nearly a month (!), I wanted to write about something I've been thinking a lot about lately - the value of creative license within the increasingly fact-based, news oriented production and consumption of information in our society.

The constant accessibility of 24-hr. cable news, the sheer amount of information available about nearly everyone and everything on the planet that is literally at our fingertips... it's truly awe-some and certainly makes for a more informed society but I wonder, does this make us any more intellectually curious, thoughtful and understanding of where we're positioned in relation to the things happening around us?

In some ways, certainly. Yet I sense that so much in our society now hinges upon whether something is true or not. Take the recent debate about Mike Daisey's "The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs". Despite the NPR snafu, Daisey has always presented his work as theatre. When we saw him at Woolly Mammoth last year, he was upfront about this - he said, "I am a storyteller". But now that certain details in his story have been presented as bungled or inconsistent, we're apt to think that the story he has to tell is no longer valid. Should that detract for his overarching message about how our (largely) ignorant consumerism fuels unsafe working conditions and the suffering of people halfway around the world?

When anyone tells you a story, you expect some embellishments. Storytellers want to impress upon the listener the significance of a story and elicit an emotional response to what they're sharing. If we took their story at face value, then fact-checked the hell out of it, could we be missing the point entirely of why they wanted to share their story in the first place? We're so keen on letting the facts speak for themselves, when sometimes we should probably be listening more closely to our emotional reactions instead.

I raise this because I think Daisey's work walks the same thin line that photography does. Photography can be presented as art, and photos can also be presented as fact. From photojournalism to the glossy magazine spreads of Photoshopped models to the sensationalist tabloid covers in the grocery checkout lane, the images we see daily run across the true-false spectrum. My curiosity doesn't necessarily lie in whether these images are real and true, but rather what sort of story are they telling and what meaning do we extract from them?

Visual Storytelling from Africa

My friend Steph has been encouraging me to check out Hornlight, a relatively new site that serves as "a platform to share diverse, complex and nuanced narratives on the Horn of Africa". I finally did and was blown away. Hornlight exhibits the range and the depth of stories from the communities of the Horn of Africa, which fail to be represented accurately in mainstream media.

Especially of interest to me was a series discussing how photographic images (particularly in the news) can continue a harmful, shallow narrative about the most pressing issues in the region, such as famine. We know that spending more time with a subject allows a more complex visual story to be told but so often the 24-hour news cycle demands quantity over quality. Feed your brain with something more nourishing. I recommend starting here.


Life Without Lights from Peter DiCampo on Vimeo.

(not from Hornlight nor the region, but an interesting and well-done short video on "Life Without Lights" in Ghana...)

Sticks and Stones

Behind the pop culture curve, as usual, I recently caught wind of Kanye West's new music video for his song, "Monsters" via Good Magazine. 

I can't say I'm surprised at the music video's disturbing portrayal of seemingly dead women because our society continues to be fed images that glamorize violence against women. I could give the producers the benefit of the doubt and speculate that they intended to create a shocking "artistic" critique against the glamorization of violence - but I won't. From ads for Dolce & Gabbana to songs about S&M from Rihanna, these images of women being threatened, brutalized or killed are becoming trendy, normalized and even worse, portrayed as sexy.

The roots of this sociological phenomenon are intriguing, but I just wish there were a bigger trend in the opposite direction - in the production of positive images of women.

One photographer who's certainly doing his share to construct an alternative story of women is the French artist, JR. Famous for his large-scale photographs of women plastered throughout Brazilian favelas or on the train cars of Kenya's railway, his "Women Are Heroes" project celebrates women's undying generosity and strength of spirit.

Some of his installations are below. You can find out more about the "Women Are Heroes" project and documentary here and see his TEDtalk from March.