Art and Subjecthood (in conversation with Menashe Kadishman) (original) (raw)
Related papers
War as spectacle for the distant, privileged viewer has been a pervasive constant throughout histories of art practise. This distance that I equate with privilege is both spatial and temporal, but explicitly it functions as the prerequisite for considering war, and its subsequent images of trauma as spectacle. All depictions of war have been envisioned, modelled and produced by some driving force or another. Thus, rather than place two modes of exposition into a dichotomy, I intend to investigate instances in which the painterly and photographic image inform both each other and the spectator’s process of relation to a traumatic scene.
Photography as artistic research. Paper for the Triennial of Marmara University, June 2013
In the world around us we see what the images have taught us to see. If people go on holiday, tempted by photographs in advertisements, they look for the images the travelling agent promised. That is what they take a picture of and this picture they post on Facebook. According to Flusser - and he thought of this way before the internet era – photographs are not representations, but programmes which ask reality to move towards the image. This becomes most painfully clear in plastic surgery, where women are trying to look like photo-shopped depictions of women. In war journalism, quite often photographers are facing a reenacted reality in front of their cameras, either or not created by themselves. They and the press officers in war zones know only too well what kind of images newspaper readers in the west want to see. We are caught in a web of images, on which reality has slowly lost its grip. This is the basic problem professional photography and each self-respecting photographer is facing.
The Makings of an Icon: Analysis of Photograph of Israeli Soldiers
Journalism and Mass Communication, 2015
This study analyses an iconic photograph of Israeli paratroopers, photographed in Jerusalem in 1967. It explores how visual and formal structural components in the image function in this photograph and how they contribute to the process of creating an icon. It explores the mechanisms that exist in visual icons and addresses the question of why some press photographs turn into iconic images while other do not, and if there is a connection between the visual structural elements in the images and the way they are perceived by the public. The study discusses how this visual logic correlates with other elements such as public opinion and myths.
2016
An image that fascinates me is a low-definition photograph circulated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS) supporters on the internet in 2014. It shows an ISIS militant in his military uniform, holding in his right hand the head of a Kurdish woman from the top of her hair while raising his left index finger. He has a large victorious smile on his bearded face. There are two bodies on the ground. One is possibly the body of a woman, from which the head has been separated. The second is the body of a man, but only his head and part of his torso are visible.
Afterlives of Photographs: The Artist’s Point of View
Slavic Review, 2017
As a comic book artist who combines surrealistic and realistic imagery, I am often forced to use different types of photographs. Some of them are just typical references for artists-anatomy, poses, gesture, facial expressions. I prefer, however, to use old photographs from family archives, documentary books, and vintage postcards, in addition to numerous photographs found on the web. I enjoy putting together and mixing various kinds of visuals because every element has its own ghost from the past and the sum of these ghosts, including some added from my imagination, gives me a sense of fullness in my graphic stories. The Duck Affair, as I called the beginning of our discussion about afterlives of photographs, is not a typical story about using old photos in my work. The Duck is a short, six-page story that combines Polish history (the Warsaw Uprising during World War II) and folktale-about the Golden Duck, drawn in 2000. I was going to create some tragic type of comic-combining realistic and cartoon elements with a funny and terrible story, the same quantity of sugar and salt. However, after finishing the fifth page, which was to be the last, I knew the story was incomplete. 1 This is when I decided to turn to the black and white photographs in my mother's old history book. The book is old and in very bad condition, missing the covers, title page, and editorial notes and endnotes too. (I suppose that it is a reprint from some Russian book because the authors' names in every chapter are Russian). All photographs from The Duck have been in my mind from the very beginning because of my mother. She is a history teacher, and I saw that book many times in my childhood, together with popular Russian and Polish war movies broadcast on television. The book is special-it contains color photographs of a happy, postwar socialist society, with smiling faces of young people and black and white pictures of tragic World War II events. The contrast between them, always very striking to me, created an eerie mood. I have added layers with my cartoon heroes to tell the truth: their names were taken from Roman Bratny's novel Kolumbowie, rocznik 20. 2 This was in the pre-internet era and I was interested only in the photographs from that book, not the text. The last page of the comic, which is at the center of our discussion here, is probably the strongest graphic page I have ever made. The chronology of photographs and places where they were taken was not important. My aim