Thinking Images v.15: Syria, social media and photojournalism
Both the scale of the protests in Syria, and the violence of the regime’s response, is growing. Yet photojournalism is able to offer little about this vital story. While we have seen powerful coverage...
View ArticleThinking Images v.16: Osama Bin-Laden and the pictorial staging of politics
The killing of Osama Bin-Laden is another of those issues in which politics is located in or around the image. However, the debate about the rights or wrongs of releasing the post-mortem photograph...
View ArticleThinking Images v.17: The starving child as symbolic marker
Contemporary news photographs are chosen less for their descriptive function and more for their capacity to provide symbolic markers to familiar interpretations and conventional narratives. Although...
View ArticleThinking Images v.18: Ratko Mladic and the limits of visibility
This photograph of former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic after his arrest was (as Tom Keenan observed on Facebook) too long in coming but nevertheless still satisfying. In many ways its hard to...
View ArticleThinking Images v.19: Do local photographers have a distinctive eye?
Do local photographers offer a distinctive perspective on their worlds? That question was prompted by reading Patrick Witty’s interesting account of a photography workshop held in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq...
View ArticleThinking Images v.20: Famine iconography as a sign of failure
The homogenisation of ‘Africa’ – the rendering of the continent into one form. The anthropomorphisation of ‘Africa’ – the representation of the continent as one person. The infantilisation of ‘Africa’...
View ArticleThinking Images v.21: Seeing the dead
When should we see the dead? In this photograph of a Libyan rebel surveying a possible massacre site we are confronted with an unusually graphic portrayal of war dead. (This picture ran in The Guardian...
View ArticleThinking Images v.22: Sport, war and a fantasy
Iran marked it’s defense week last Thursday with a vast display of units and hardware. Among the photographs of the parade was this rather odd image. I saw it in print in the South China Morning Post,...
View ArticleThinking Images v.23: Gaddafi’s death
The extensive pictorial coverage of Gaddafi’s death yesterday takes us back to the question I posed, also in relation to Libya, at the end of August – when should we see the dead? There I wrote that...
View ArticleThinking Images v.24: Lu Guang’s activist photography
What is the power of photography? In the abstract, that is an impossible question to answer. There are many general claims about photography being able to ‘change the world’, but when it comes to...
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