a note before we get into today's video lecture I just want to give you all a heads up that there will be a couple of disturbing images shown in this video um I will give a heads up prior to showing them they will be on the screen only for a few seconds and then I will inform you when I have removed the pictures from the screen so with that being said today we are talking about Susan s in Plato's Cave a uh chapter from her book on photography so I always like to start off this unit on visual imagery with John Burger's ways of seeing because again that text video is really about how we construct knowledge about the world and about images and then I will then kind of do a diversion to Plato's allegory of the cave because on tag references Plato's allegory of the cave in this uh text so we are back talking about the role of visual imagery and this one more explicitly deals with how visual imagery informs us and informs what we know or what we think we know about the the next video lecture um Errol Morris's will the real hooded man please stand up in that article he doesn't explicitly reference Susan s tag but in a interview that he did not long after that article came out he does reference another work by song tag so all this is uh kind of weaving together and hopefully coming together so let's dive in to the text all right um making sure I have the right one up give me one okay so uh diving in Susan sag's on photography is the book in Plato's Cave is the text in question uh sag begins with that reference to Plato's allegory of the cave where she says humankind lingers unregenerate in Plato's Cave so again this is that idea of Plato's allegory of the cave humankind we are trapped in a cave of our own ignorance and what we think is reality is really just Shadows on the wall and she kind of hints at this uh I believe on the next page where she says to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and therefore like power uh so we can see images of you know the struggle to climb Mount Everest or you know we can see you know War photography or imagery of people suffering but unless if we've actually experienced those things we don't truly know what those things feel like right so when she says that it feels like knowledge that's kind of what she's talking about and knowledge is a kind of power it is the illusion of knowledge we think we know what it's like to climb Mount Everest we understand that it's extraordinarily difficult it takes you know training and planning and Logistics you know we see images of War which we're going to come back to later today and we understand that obviously like war is you know extraordinarily you know it's the worst element in mankind and we often use this knowledge to then make judgments or assumptions and we feel like we can do that because we think we have the power to make those assumptions to make uh those claims and part of this is because she says photographs furnish evidence something we hear about but doubt seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it and this is going to be really Crystal Clear uh when we discuss AOL Morris's will the real hooded man please stand up S tag published this I want to say in the 70s uh 70s or 80s don't quote me on that whereas Errol Morris is will the real hooded man please stand up that came out in the early 2000s uh in the aftermath of the Abu gra incident uh after 911 so so when we look at a picture we think we know what's happening but really what we're trying to do in a brarian sense is we are mystifying the image we are impressing meaning on that image um and this is going to be very apparent when later in this video we talked about images of people suffering all right but before we get to the really heavy stuff I want to first talk about how images can be used um by people as kind of a public performance of sorts or a I don't know a public display I suppose we might say so I'm going to skip down a couple of pages and S tag she says memorializing the achievements of individual considered as members of families as well as of other groups is the earliest popular use of photography for at least a century the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas cameras go with family life according to a sociological study done in France most households have a camera but a household with children it's twice as likely to have at least one camera as a household in which there are no children not to take pictures of one's children particularly when they are small is a sign of Parental indifference just is not turning up from one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion and if any of you are parents and even if you're not you were children once you know that parents take tons of pictures of their children uh whenever I'm in a class with parents usually their phones and even my friends who have kids their phones are just full of images of their children uh for me it's images of my cat uh so F child right but reason why I want to point this out is because further down on tag she says through photographs each family constructs a portrait Chronicle of itself a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness I think about you know the household that I grew up in and we would go and get family pictures taken and then we would get them framed and then we would hang them in the hallway or in the stairwell and it was very much this like idealized version of our family not to say that like my childhood was particularly traumatic or anything like that but um we we always like put on our best clothes every one has to smile it is the appearance of a happy functioning family uh and she says across the page at the top those ghostly traces photographs Supply the token presence of dispersed relatives a family's photographed album is generally about the extended family and often is All That Remains of it and my grandparents are now they've been passed for gosh uh over a decade um maybe even two decades and you know they had tons of photo albums and while a photo album and a photograph represents a version of my family and a version of my grandparents it's certainly not for lack of a better phrase the whole picture right it's it's a snapshot in time okay and we can look at this in another way of how we do or how we use photography to perform so we use photography to put on a performance of a happy family of a normal family and uh I believe later in the semester we're going to discuss Susan Griffin's our secret or our time and we're going to talk about a Foy family and a family portrait but more on that later in this semester but so we use we can use pictures as a way to kind of perform ourselves or perform our families perfect example of this is online dating right uh I mean it's been a while since I've been on the dating scene but you know when you make a profile for a dating app you always put up the best pictures of yourself so like if you're a guy you know it's you in a suit you know maybe you engaging in some sort of like physical activity uh you hanging out with friends maybe not of the gender you're trying to attract um right because you're not putting up the picture of you four hours into a Netflix binge or screaming at some old lady who's taking too long to cross the street you are trying to control the perception of yourself and you do that through photography you know the Selfies that we post you know the the images on our Instagram feeds or you know the what we're posting on Tik Tok whatever all of that is carefully crafted and curated to control an image about ourselves part of this is because when we take an image of ourselves and when we post an image about it that is US controlling that Nar narrative and here in a minute we're going to talk about when other people control that narrative uh and how we feel about it but before we do that another perfect example of this sort of performance is anytime you go on vacation well did you really go on vacation if you didn't share pictures of it on social media uh again even though this was written decades before social media sag kind of saw where this was going uh she says for the first time in history large large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made that the program was carried out that fun was had photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family friends neighbors right you know it's like even if you go to a concert I'm as guilty of this as anyone you take a picture at the excuse me at the concert or you even take a video while you're at the concert uh even if the audio quality on the video is garbage but you want to let everyone know you were at the Taylor Swift concert or you were at the Metallica concert or whatever uh going to pause just for one second to blow my so um sorry about that so we use photographs to put on a public display to control a narrative we are a happy family I am a person worthy of dating we go out we do fun things look at this delicious meal I've eaten right like people always take pictures of this amazing meal that they ate but it's like you didn't take a picture of the bowl of cereal uh that you had for breakfast okay all this is constructing an image of ourselves however what happens when other people uh take images or take pictures of us what do we do then um and so for this I'd like to scroll down couple Pages whoops too far down here where she says still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture to photograph people is to violate them by seeing them as they never see themselves by having knowledge of them they can never have it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed I'll give you two examples personal examples uh one time this was maybe a decade ago I was at the grocery store and uh the grocery store clerk she said oh I saw a picture of you on Instagram this grocery store clerk and I we were kind of friends um and she tells me she saw a picture of me on Instagram and I'm horrified because I didn't have Instagram at the time and then she told me yeah uh one of your students took a picture of you in class which further terrified me and she said they hashtagged it best Professor ever I was like well okay clearly this is fine uh and I found the picture in question and it was just a picture of me like sitting there reading I was clearly unaware I was being photographed and you know while I was tickled that they hashtagged it best Professor ever still kind of bugged me because I didn't consent to be photographed and if the cashier hadn't told me I never would have known I'll give you another example this one was slightly more recent uh about five or six years ago was teaching a class and it was like a Monday and one of the students said oh Professor Koger did you and your wife have fun at Disneyland over the weekend and I kind of looked at him and I was like how did you know my wife and I were at Disneyland and the student replies oh so and so saw you and your wife in lines for Pirates of the Caribbean took a picture and then sent it in the group chat and said kogre and his wife are at Disneyland and so I said first of all don't take pictures of my wife secondly don't be creepy right like they totally could have come over and be like Oh Professor Koger so good to see you like can we share a boat you know or something like that like any of that would have been better than them being like Oh yeah we took a picture of you and your wife without you knowing it and we shared it with other students like no that's that's not okay and so for a few years actually I had a statement in my syllabus explicitly telling students they could not take pictures of me and even like when I'm in class sometimes when I'm writing notes on the Whiteboard students will take pictures of the Whiteboard and I always try my best to get out of the frame so like I'll go and stand on the other side of the room um because I I just don't want to be in their pictures um you know and I think that's fair so let's talk about consent and photography because that's what she's talking about here and an interesting example of this actually is back on the page we were just looking at uh if we go back to page seven of the PDF um again where she says you know talking about households with children are more likely to have a camera now on social media you know parents can share pictures and videos of their children but children especially infants and toddlers they cannot consent to their images being shared and being taken in the first place now on the one hand some people might think this is silly they're just kids right however there are some valid uh concerns with this first of all pedophiles and you know sex traffickers okay an image first of all it can be shared without so like let's say a parent uploads a picture to Facebook someone may take that picture without their knowing and share it with a group that they wouldn't want that picture to be shared with then your location can also be deduced from images I remember one time a parent friend of mine um shared a picture of her child's like certificate of achievement and they had blacked out the name of the school and I had made the comment of like oh I didn't know your son went to soand so school and the parent DMD me they deleted my comment and they dm'd me I knew what the certificate was because it was the same school I had gone to so the parent deletes my comment I was like Hey I want you to know that I deleted your comment just because you mentioned the name of the school like I'm glad you're proud of my son blah blah blah you know for safety's sake please don't mention the name of the school I was like oh my God I'm so sorry I didn't think about this secondly and this has become more of an issue for like family influencers because that's a thing uh you have families who on YouTube and Tik Tok regularly Vlog and upload videos of their kids and their family lives and many of the kids in those videos later on they admit they're not okay with it um so we do have to be mindful about when we talk about consent and photography that kids they cannot consent to it right and the bigger issue with consent and photography has to do with anytime there are images of people clearly suffering all right so if we scroll up a couple of pages um s tag writes while a painting or a Pros description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency but despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs Authority interest seductiveness the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually Shady commerce between art and truth even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality they are still haunted by tacet imperatives of taste and conscience the immensely gifted members of the farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s among them Walker Evan Walker Evans excuse me Dorothy and Lang Ben Shan and Russell Lee would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film The precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own Notions about poverty light dignity texture exploitation and geometry and then she says continuing in deciding how a picture should look and preferring one exposure to another photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects so one of the photographers um that s tag mentions is Dorothy and Lang all right uh Dorothy and Lang and here I'll show probably the most famous picture she took this isn't a particularly um you know catastrophic image or something this is one of the most famous images that Dorothy way took and arguably one of the most famous pictures to come out of the depression we have a mother figure with two children and you can clearly see even if you don't know anything about the depression the Great Depression even if you don't know anything about the subject you can clearly see concern on her face discomfort right and imagine that someone is standing there with again one of those old timey cameras so it's not even like a quick you know point and shoot type scenario a photographer is standing there taking dozens of pictures trying to capture right moment of suffering and while while we can look at this image and appreciate it for its beauty uh for its compositional quality and while it is instructive we do have to wonder if something else is working on us as a result of seeing this image and other images uh like this so to come back uh to Sag right she says further down on page uh bottom of page eight uh top of page nine photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonso reaching for the gasoline can of a Bengali geria in the act of bayonetting a trust up collaborator comes from the awareness how plausible it has become in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life to choose the photograph the person who intervenes cannot record the person who's recording cannot intervene and this is where she references uh the film that burger references zigga vertov's film man with moving camera where in early photojournalism the sort of directive was a photographer is supposed to be a neutral Observer they are only there to document and to take pictures they're not there to intervene so I'm going to show an image in a moment I'm going to describe the image first then I'm going to show it all right the image I'm about to show was taken by a photographer named Kevin Carter Uh Kevin Carter took a picture of a uh African Child um I believe from Sudan but don't quote me on that a child from the continent of Africa starving to death and in the background is a vulture I'm going to show the picture Okay so picture is now on the screen so we can see the vulture in the background and the starving child here in the foreground the picture is now off the screen that picture won numerous Awards but it also sparked numerous debates about the ethics of photojournalism and I believe Kevin Carter ended up taking his own life not long afterwards um because he was haunted by this image he could have done something it could have helped that child and I think today I'm not a photography instructor but I think today um because of like what happened with Kevin Carter and other photographers is that uh the directive has changed to now where it's kind of like okay yeah take the picture but then do what you can especially if it saves the life of a child okay uh because and this is going to be one of uh sag's main driving points is on the one hand we do need to know what's going on in the world right um images of War of Famine of Destruction these can inform us and that information can be vitally important okay but photographers don't always necessarily know how their pictures may be received and how their pictures may be interpreted if we scroll down a couple Pages sag says photograph that brings news some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude the photographs Matthew Brady and his colleagues took of the hores the battlefields did not make people any less Keen to go on with the Civil War the photographs of ill-clad skeletal prisoners held at Andersonville inflamed Northern public opinion against the South um so what she's talking about here is Civil War photography part of the idea was to stop the war to show the brutality of the war right you had Northern soldiers being held as prisoners of War and instead what it did was it just made people more Angry against the South so not only did it not achieve what uh Brady and others wanted to do many ways it backfired uh the most glaring example of this is what happened in Vietnam right on the next page um sag writes quote photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972 a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American Napalm running down a highway toward the camera her arms open screaming with pain probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a 100 hours of televised barbarities um I'm going to show this picture even though I'm sure many of you have already seen it so the image is going to be on the screen the image is now on the screen okay uh and it's exactly as s tag described many of you have seen this we have villagers fleeing the Vietnamese jungle in the background their homes you know are being burned by Nate pal okay and the image is now off the screen Vietnam uh the government originally and that wasn't a government photograph to my knowledge but the government originally wanted to photograph and videotape what was going on in the war to educate the American public about what the reality of war is and to kind of give them a glimpse to understand what soldiers are going through and it's backfired spect spectacularly and you know soldiers came home from Vietnam and you know you had the public spitting on them and calling them criminals and things like that uh so again you know documenting the horrors of War on the one hand is important um but we always have to wonder at what cost right she says photographs shock in so far as they show something novel and unfortunately the anti keeps getting raised partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror one's first encounter with photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of Revelation the prototypically modern Revelation a negative Epiphany so what she's saying here is that more and more photographs only impact us only affect us if they show us something new something maybe that we haven't seen before and because we are constantly being exposed to images of violence images of war images of death because of this we are becoming increasingly numb to those effects uh sag gives her own experience she says for me it was photographs of Bergen bson and daal so Nazi death camps she says which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945 nothing I have seen in photographs or in real life ever cut me as sharply deeply instantaneously indeed it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two two parts before I saw those photographs and after and you know after World War II uh in the immediate aftermath of World War II the the Allies intentionally photographed the the atrocities committed by the Nazis because they were concerned that nobody would actually believe them in what they saw and you know these are extraordinarily important historical documents right but it seems like today whether it's on the news on social media or whatever that as sag says the endless proliferation of images of violence runs the risk of making us numb she asks what good was served by seeing them those photographs s they were only photographs of an event I scarcely had heard of and could do nothing to affect suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve when I looked at those photographs something broke some limit had been reached and not only that of horror I felt irrevocably grieved wounded but a part of my feeling started to tighten something went dead something is still crying to suffer is one thing another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering which is not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate it can also corrupt them so it's kind of like again what do we do right we we need to be informed we do need to we can't look away right again recall Burger to look is an act of choice but how do we find that balance between ethics and inability I don't know she says on the opposite column the ethical content of photographs is Fragile with the possible exception of photographs of those whes like the Nazi camps that have gained the status of ethical reference point most photographs do not keep their emotional charge when we look at the image Dorothy Lang took of you know the woman from the greatek depression I don't think it has the same impact on us as it did a hundred years ago and while we can look at the image of the Vietnamese fleeing their Village and it is a very powerful image it's nowhere near as powerful as it was back in the 1970s right um she says where is this just looking through my notes the the risk or the concern right is at the bottom of this paragraph on page 13 of the PDF images transfix images anesthetize and with that right there's two risks there actually one is the fetishization of images of violence and death and whatever but also that numbness that she's talking about an event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs think of the Vietnam War for a counter example think of the gou archipelago of which we have no photographs right um and if you don't know what that's a reference to I mean I would say have fun Googling that but it's it's not fun so this is Plato's Cave right she says industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution poignant longings for beauty or an end to probing below the surface um what do we do uh Errol Morris in our next video lecture he's going to focus on a particular incident um this was in the aftermath of September 11th and it was at a Detention Facility uh called Abu gra and when the pictures from the Abu Gra gra prison were released they were everywhere and Morris he's really going to take a bergeran approach to it and he's going to say we think we know what we're looking at but do we and if we are going to choose to look at images sometimes we need to ask basic questions before we can jump to conclusions about those pictures Susan sag just as kind of a closing note is a fantastic writer um she's one of those authors who even though this was written back in the 70s or 80s um you know it still resonates uh today uh let me see yeah this was first published in 1971 and just a very aware writer so if you enjoyed this reading I do encourage you first of all the book on photography is excellent it's worth reading anyway but so is the overwhelming body of her work so so I hope you enjoyed this reading I hope you enjoyed this video lecture and I will see you all next time take it easy