Susan Sonntag defines:
… and they even re-appear in grim mutations (via) of the society, which produces them in the first instance. Re-jected images of the psyche always did. …. There is a difficulty to handle nowaday’s images, which also come with the ambigious notion of some disbelief because of the inherent mutability of digital de-coding/evoking which is needed to create a visualy readable version. Thus the reactions are likely to be ..
as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.
…
..like viewing known fantasies no one wants to acknowledge ..
Besides the irritation about the ubiquitous availability this might have been in a simple way also already been expressed through the words of Rumsfeld:
Today’s soldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ”running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.” The administration’s effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are made public.
…
The digital hall of mirrors seems to produce images, which in their flexibilty of production and circulation mingle more than before aspects of fantasies of the society (which evokes them and the production tools) and the captured events. The images still deliver a limited frame of proof, but obviously need to be classified as evidence again. Susan Sontag interesting article reads their evidence in relation to the psyche of the producers in a wider social aspect.
One thought on “In our digital hall of mirrors,”
Comments are closed.