From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/14/02-12:43:05 PM Z
>
>> in a kind of humorous way, for saying that everything now is some sort of
>> simulacrum.>
>
> Ahhhh... life in a simulacrum: THOSE were the days.... (Hey!! wait a
> minute - didn't mothers use to feed their babies Simulacrum?!?!?!)
I really think that's what's wrong with me: I was fed Simulacrum instead of
breast milk. I made sure the same thing did not happen to my own baby.
You have to feel sorry for those poor Baudrillard children.
>
>> The second idea--it might seem the converse of what has just been
>> described--is that in a world saturated, even hypersaturated, with images,
>
> Shannon, my sincere apologies - I'm not picking on you. Your interest in
> posting this is sincere and earnest, and I don't wish to negate that.
You know me better than that. It's a long tradition in Southern talking and
story-telling that you are always joking, on some level.
Maybe we're sort of like French intellectuals in that way.
> But, I'd like to ask: at what point did it become necessary for artists to
> also be intellectuals?? To a very great extent, the two "disciplines" (for
> lack of a better word) are mutually exclusive.
OK, Susan Sontag is an intellectual, and we are artists. It's not necessary
to be an intellectual to be an artist; in fact, as you say, it's a whole
nother ballgame, and the skills of one side don't necessarily cross over to
the other side. To me the whole speculative project of thinking about
photographs in the way that Sontag does is sort of a fun game. I could make
photographs without it. It's just a sideshow.
And, I'd like to get clear:
> are we discussing ideas which serve images - or are we discussing images
> which serve ideas?? To me, the difference is an important one....
Again, I admit, that this is not central to our project of making images.
But, I had been thinking about war a lot lately, so her article riveted me.
I had just re-read The Great War and Modern Memory because I was helping
somebody with a project about Wilfred Owen; and a bunch of soldier boys came
to our house for Thanksgiving, all dressed in their uniforms and just
itching to go to Iraq. I have harbored a secret romantic desire to be a
photojournalist in a war. Yet photographs like the ones in the article
upset me and I tend to avoid them. I don't watch television or look at Time
or Newsweek or any major newspapers. I just read the New Yorker, which used
to be photograph-free, and a few other magazines like that. Sontag was
talking about the mixture of attraction (a kind of voyeurism) and revulsion
that we feel about images of war, so she was addressing something that's a
problem for me. Also, she mentioned the fact that war seems to hold a
special fascination for men, especially young men who have no idea what it's
really like, but only a romantic image of it. I was thinking about that a
lot over Thanksgiving weekend, but didn't know how to talk about it with the
young soldiers at our house. I suddenly felt very old.
Does this have anything AT ALL to do with the photographs I'm making now?
Maybe it does. In a sense I make photographs that are the OPPOSITE of war
photographs. They are about a sort of pastoral ideal; they could be said to
be romanticized a bit, in the same way that young men romanticize war. The
pastoral ideal, though, is always in the background of any war photograph.
If you read the Iliad, for example, the first great work of art about war,
and perhaps the first anti-war work of art, Homer is always contrasting the
home where the dying soldier was born--his beautiful island in the Aegean,
renowned for limitless pastures where the best horses are bred, for
example--to his grisly death in the dust in front of the walls of Troy.
Similarly, in the poetry of WWI we find the same sort of irony: the contrast
between the ruined landscape around Wipers and the remembered landscape of
rural England, the cottage with roses round the door, etc. In fact in some
cases it is the pastoral ideal, the homeland that has to be defended from
barbarians, that motivates ordinary soldiers, as well as providing a lot of
propaganda tools to the organizers of the war. (You can see this also in
the Lord of the Rings; the object is to "save the Shire" from the
devastation that's already happened in the rest of Middle Earth.)
But I hope that these photographs I'm making will not be used that way.
They have a polemical intent in the same way that photographs of the horrors
of war do, though: their purpose is to remind people that there are still
spirit-filled landscapes that are not wilderness (as in Ansel Adams) but
still valuable and worth preserving. Some people in Houston look at them
and say, "This doesn't look real." Those poor folks think it is too pretty
and magical looking to be real. But it IS real. This is kind of the
inverse of looking at a war photograph and saying, "This is too horrible to
be real." But it IS real. The thing about a photograph is, it is both an
artifact, chosen and framed by the photographer and expressing her
sensibility and moral sense of love or outrage; and IT IS REAL. It's a
document. This is what fascinates me about our medium, that painting can't
touch, or even writing.
--shannon
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