Week 4 Readings
In this week, the readings were tough but I worked my way through them in order to understand the concepts that were being put across, as these were the readings I used in my presentation with my group.
Stuart Hall: The Spectacle of the Other
In Chapter 5, Hall focuses on what a stereotype is and what this means exactly. He uses Dyers analogy, in which we are always making sense of something in terms of wider social categories, which in result may emulate a stereotype. However, this deploys a strategy of splitting and excluding things that do not fit or that are considered different. "Stereotyping is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order". It creates an 'us' and 'them' mentality, that splits people apart.
This can be related to Arbus' work, who constantly photographed people who are seen to be the 'other'. Interestingly, her photography was not to make fun or marginalize these people: it was to celebrate the diversity.
Robert Azoulay: Photographys Actants.
Azoulay focuses on the role of photography and what it can do to different people, for example the photographer, the photographed, and the audience. He used one of Dorothea Lange’s well-known portrait of an American migrant mother from 1935 (Migrant Mother). This image cannot be seen as Lange’s own account of her subject (the pitiful conditions of Southern US migrant workers in the 1930s), or to that of the mass media (the tragic face of the Depression), historians , or the subject of the photograph herself, Florence Owens Thompson (who thought the photo did not reflect who she once was as a person, and as such an image that should be withdrawn from circulation). It can be argued that each of these positions is a partial account of what the photograph signifies to each of its ‘actants’, which means the photographer, the photographed, and the audience, under given conditions at a particular time. In other words it perpetrates a greater violation than the violation produced by the initial encounter.
Stuart Hall: The Spectacle of the Other
In Chapter 5, Hall focuses on what a stereotype is and what this means exactly. He uses Dyers analogy, in which we are always making sense of something in terms of wider social categories, which in result may emulate a stereotype. However, this deploys a strategy of splitting and excluding things that do not fit or that are considered different. "Stereotyping is part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order". It creates an 'us' and 'them' mentality, that splits people apart.
This can be related to Arbus' work, who constantly photographed people who are seen to be the 'other'. Interestingly, her photography was not to make fun or marginalize these people: it was to celebrate the diversity.
Robert Azoulay: Photographys Actants.
Azoulay focuses on the role of photography and what it can do to different people, for example the photographer, the photographed, and the audience. He used one of Dorothea Lange’s well-known portrait of an American migrant mother from 1935 (Migrant Mother). This image cannot be seen as Lange’s own account of her subject (the pitiful conditions of Southern US migrant workers in the 1930s), or to that of the mass media (the tragic face of the Depression), historians , or the subject of the photograph herself, Florence Owens Thompson (who thought the photo did not reflect who she once was as a person, and as such an image that should be withdrawn from circulation). It can be argued that each of these positions is a partial account of what the photograph signifies to each of its ‘actants’, which means the photographer, the photographed, and the audience, under given conditions at a particular time. In other words it perpetrates a greater violation than the violation produced by the initial encounter.
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