Anarchy in The UK? Not So Fast
November 17, 2010 by SocProf and tagged Collective Behavior, Dramaturgy, Media
Via Avedon. So, we know British students have been demonstrating against increased in fees for their education. This picture has made the rounds and has been reproduced by practically every British newspaper as an illustration of the riff-raffs:
But the folks over at Techdirt noticed something if one zoomed back and got a little wider perspective, you get this:
Much less anarchic destruction, much more performance. Funny what elision of mise en scène can do. How interesting that a simple shift in angle ends up creating a different visual construction of reality.
Now y’all go have a discussion on how the media produce social reality rather than “just report” on it.
Posted in Collective Behavior, Dramaturgy, Media | 5 Comments »
November 18th, 2010 at 3:00 am
Interesting. However, a good photographer/photo editor is always going to crop a shot, or use a version of it, that has the most impact to illustrate the article.
November 18th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Yes, but I think it’s one thing to crop / edit but quite another to actually change the meaning of the photo, no?
November 19th, 2010 at 4:19 am
It’s not such a big difference, I think. There were worse cases, where things were Photoshopped just to make it look worse than it was. I think it was from the Iraq war or Gaza.
November 19th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
It may not be a big difference in strict photographic terms, but it became one once a political interpretation was superimposed on it, and then replicated over and over.
November 19th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Photography is not reality, photographs is generally taken for a purpose. But still after all this time we have had photography, photographic “evidence” has a certain weight of showing the “truth”. Despite that photographic pictures have been corrupted from the very beginning and are made to speak for this or for that, according as the finger of mammon does point.
“One such case in 1886 involved a dispute between two persons about a wall. The plaintiff charged his neighbor’s wall was too high and obstructed the sunlight. The judge seemed to be swayed by a photograph showing the wall to be immense and casting a dark and gloomy curtain of shadow, as charged. But then the defendant’s lawyer, with a smile, handed the judge a photograph of the same scene. This time, the judge was confronted with a picture that seemed to show a tiny, insignificant wall that could not possibly cause any harm. Both law journals and the photographic press noted this case.”
photographymuseum.com