Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India - NYTimes.com

Vogue’s Fashion Photos Spark Debate in India - NYTimes.com



A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding without a helmet and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way — except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag (usually more than $10,000, if you can find one) prominently displayed on her wrist.

Elsewhere, a toothless barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella (about $200).

Welcome to the new India — at least as Vogue sees it.

Vogue India’s August issue presented a 16-page vision of supple handbags, bejeweled clutches and status-symbol umbrellas, modeled not by runway stars or the wealthiest fraction of Indian society who can actually afford these accessories, but by average Indian people.



... The juxtaposition between poverty and growing wealth presents an unsavory dilemma for luxury goods makers jumping into India: How does one sell something like a $1,000 handbag in a country where most people will never amass that sum of money in their lives, and many are starving?

... For now, the Indian middle and upper class — and the companies that aim to cater to it — are just getting used to having new money, said V. Sunil, creative director for advertising agency Weiden & Kennedy in India, which opened its first office here last September. “No one thinks they need to do something deeper for the public,” like address India’s social ills, he said.

Still, the in-your-face poverty of India, where beggars sometimes sit outside five-star hotels, does present challenges that companies do not face in other markets. In China, most of the very poor live in rural areas, said Mr. Debnam. “Most of the luxury companies don’t consider these people,” when they’re thinking of selling products, he said, “and even the consumer product companies don’t look at them.”

Not taking a close enough look at the “real people” is drawing criticism for Vogue, too. “The magazine does not even bother to identify the subjects” of the photos, said Ms. Gahlaut, the columnist. Instead, Vogue names the brands of the accessories in the captions, and says they are worn by a lady or a man.

Democracy Now! | NYPD Officer Caught on Tape Body-Slamming Cyclist During Critical Mass Ride

Democracy Now! | NYPD Officer Caught on Tape Body-Slamming Cyclist During Critical Mass Ride

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And initially, the biker was arrested and charged, is that correct?

EILEEN CLANCY: He was arrested and charged with assaulting the police officer, which is a very serious charge. So he had two misdemeanor charges, I think, and a lower charge. And the police officer made a statement that he’d been basically run into, deliberately run into, by the bicyclist. And I think you can see from the video that the bicyclist is veering away from the police officer, who’s pursuing this fellow.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the officer claimed initially that the biker was veering in and out of traffic and aimed for him, is that what he said?

EILEEN CLANCY: That’s what the police affidavit says, so that’s what was sworn to by the police officer under a penalty of perjury, which in this case would be a felony.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And in fact, there’s no cars in the video.



...
EILEEN CLANCY: And that’s what we used the [2004] Republican convention for in New York. We were able to find out that the police were using agents provacateurs. We were able to find out—we were very surprised—that the district attorney’s office was faking video evidence, police video evidence. And we were able to show that the police officers lied in many instances. So, we don’t know what’s going to happen in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, but, you know, we’re going be there to cover it, and we’ll be hoping that people share their videotapes with us. And if you would like to help us, please send a contribution in through the website.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what do you mean, faking video evidence?

EILEEN CLANCY: Well, what happened in the 2004 demonstrations is, in one instance, I discovered that there were two different copies of the same police videotape, and the district attorney had given a defense attorney a copy of a police tape for use at a trial and said, “This is our evidence against you. This is our video evidence against you.” And I found a copy of the police tape with a lot more video, and it then was handed over as evidence. And it turned out that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had removed two sections—and that would have to be deliberate; you can’t do this by mistake—two entire sections of several minutes, the sections that showed that the man who had these charges, Alexander Dunlop, was innocent of the charges. And it was extraordinary. And when that was discovered, the district attorney immediately dropped all the charges.

Jesse Lerner's Aesthetic and Cultural Hybrids | GreenCine

Jesse Lerner's Aesthetic and Cultural Hybrids | GreenCine



...
I think the collage aesthetic, with the rough edges still showing, encourages us as viewers to engage critically with the material we're watching, rather than simply letting the visual or narrative pleasures wash us away. It's a bit like what Brecht called the "alienation effect."

But when you're dealing with information that's culturally specific, or that is common knowledge in one context and much less so in another, how do you make sure everyone else is following along, regardless of their background? That's something I'm always struggling with. If I can provide the background information to those who need it, and use the opportunity to provide the other part of the audience with a laugh, then that's the best the solution.

Do the various accents of your speakers in The American Egypt reflect the home region of the person who actually said those words? Interesting touch.

Yes, that was what I was trying for. The Yucatecan Spanish is very distinctive. I don't know how to describe it, but I can imitate it (though perhaps not very convincingly). It's an accent that's disappearing slowly, mostly because of the mass media. So the Yucatecan voices I recorded there with people who spoke that way. And the same thing with the English-language parts, though of course it's highly speculative, as these are for the most part people who left no recordings of their voices.

...
For Mexican intellectuals in the aftermath of the Revolution, the Indian was the central problem. For centuries they had looked down on the Indian, but the Revolution had changed everything, and cast the Indian in the role of protagonists, as active agents of historical change. After the Revolution, the question remained: if Mexico was going to become a modern country, what role would the Indian play? The existing models of modernity were all Western nations. Could one imagine a country that was both Indian and modern? How might that be different from the modernity of Western Europe or the US?

...
I don't especially like the idea of your films being called "fake" documentaries, as all docs are fake in some ways. Yours get at the truth via a different route, that's all. Or maybe this "fake" thing bothers me more than it bothers you.


Well, I explore this sub-genre in much greater depth in my book (with Alexandra Juhasz) F is for Phony. While we argue that most "fake docs" are fiction films (with a script, actors, etc.) that present themselves as if they were documentaries, Ruins functions differently. On one hand, it's a documentary about fakes, so it's a fake documentary in the way that a baseball documentary is a documentary about baseball. And while most of the archival footage that I incorporated into the film is in fact that - archival - there were moments when I couldn't find the archival material I needed to make a certain point, and I ended up shooting certain sequences myself, hand-processing the footage to get a certain distressed look, and incorporating this original material disguised as archival images alongside real historical footage. It's a lot like the practice of the forger of archaeological artifacts, who has to add a patina of antiquity to the objects in order to pass them off as authentic. Again, with the sound, I ran certain original audio elements through filters in ProTools in order to get the hiss of an old optical track. It's at that point that I started to identify with Brigido Lara, the forger at the center of my film, and began to explore the parallels between forging and documentary filmmaking.

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Guy Ben-Ner - Berkeley's Island

U B U W E B - Film & Video: Guy Ben-Ner - Berkeley's Island



wow. fantasy island, dick tricks, and pathos.

The Transom Review: Errol Morris's Topic

The Transom Review: Errol Morris's Topic



"My belief that believing is seeing and not the other way around. If there's enough pressure, if there's enough reason to believe something, then people will believe it, no matter what the underlying truth might be, no matter what the evidence against their believing it might be."
--Errol Morris



"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A STRAIGHT INTERVIEW. (Although I would admit there are good and bad interviews.)

Interviews are human relationships in a "laboratory" setting. They allow us to scrutinize the nature of how one person relates to another and vice versa... As such, all the things that are common features of the "ordinary" relationships appear in the interviews - deceit, coyness, misdirection, sincerity, honesty, dishonesty, confusion, etc.

In some instances - I dare say - there is the powerful impulse to protect a subject from himself or to show him in the best possible light. I have a lot of these kinds of impulses. I actually like people to look good, and I attempt - even if I don't succeed - to capture their complexity in the interview and in the film I eventually produce.

But let me provide a couple of definitions of a good interview.

A GOOD INTERVIEW CAPTURES THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SUBJECT.

and

A GOOD INTERVIEW CAPTURES THE COMPLEXITY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INTERVIEWER AND THE SUBJECT.

Sometimes it is a matter of "discretion," sometimes it is "let the best man win..." But, it's usually a lot more complex than that."

Beginnings... Unbidden Radio, by Jim Metzner

Beginnings... Unbidden Radio, by Jim Metzner



Although I've cringed when I listen back to the stiffness of the narration of my early programs, they were how I learned the craft of radio -- by the seat of my pants. I made lots of mistakes.

Like what? Well, like recording the reenactment of the battle of Lexington and Concord with my tape recorder's limiter on, reducing all that beautiful echoey musket fire into a series of pallid hand-claps. Like not using a good enough windscreen, and running out of batteries, and not bringing the proper cable, and on and on.

In the beginning, I had no models to emulate or imitate; it was all new. I had two minutes to do more or less what I wanted to, assuming it had something to do with greater Boston. I learned the power of a compelling question. I learned that sounds can take you to places where words can't go. I learned that a tape recorder and microphone were magic keys that could open doors and memories. That an "interview" could be something more than just a gathering of information. That the well of sounds is bottomless, and you can return to drink from it at any time and there would be something new. I learned to respect the recordings, the sounds, the words -- and regard them as gifts, gifts that needed to be honored and shared.

Perhaps the best advice I could give you about beginning is that the first impulse and exultation of it will only take you so far, so choose your path and your subject matter accordingly. If you've found something that you love to do, that love will likely sustain you through the periods of drought and resistance.

The next best advice would be to find your own voice, your own way of listening, your own particular way of telling a story. The rest is practice, perseverence, and being free enough to learn from what may seem like a mistake.

5B4: A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham

5B4: A Shimmer of Possibility by Paul Graham

It was the ‘less is more’ approach that Chekhov mastered and this is the lesson Graham has learned and applied to his craft. Graham conveys so much about his subjects in so few images. He sets us within the flow of their life for small amounts of time and paves the way for a chance at revelation if we are open to it. Mind you, these are revelations that are not defined by a neat and tidy beginning middle and an end. These are open ended moments where we pause to notice and experience these subjects, and as they move on in their own direction and continuum, we move on our way too. Ships passing in America.

BOMB Magazine: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward

BOMB Magazine: Tod Papageorge by Richard B. Woodward



RW Are the mistakes that your students are prone to now the same mistakes that students were prone to when you were teaching back in the late ‘60s?

TP No. I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there’s a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too. Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there’s as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.

...

RW Well, the other book you have coming out next year, the sports pictures from 1970, published by Aperture, are even more about crowds and spectators. But what struck me as I was looking at them on disk last night is that all the people look as if they’re on the margins. Even if you’re photographing the star quarterback or pitcher, the wide-angle lens spreads and compresses everything: it’s such an equalizer. No one person really can be more important than any other. It’s a very democratic way of photographing.

TP I’m glad you brought that up because the project was to a certain degree an aesthetic experiment. Virtually all of it was done with a 28 mm lens, a very wide-angle lens. So as much as the pictures are almost desperately about something—the violently disturbed American spirit at the time of Vietnam—they were also about trying to “fill a cup up to the brim / and even above the brim,” as Frost put it. I think the project works both as a strong set of pictures and as the description of an intense experience: I wouldn’t want you to believe that it’s simply a kind of visual aftereffect of being out in the world using a particular lens. But a good part of what I was playing with was metaphorically throwing this very small wide-angle lens at a world in breakdown to see if, picture after picture after picture, I could make something that was dense and coherent at the same time. So you could say that the work was the result of a calculation—not a calculation that assumed there would be successful results, but one that assumed, in fact, that there probably wouldn’t be.

RW That’s the thing about a 28. Even if you’re photographing one person—

TP Well, I almost never did.

RW But even if you were! If you were photographing the starting quarterback, the 28 spreads out space so he would not appear to be this grand, heroic figure. Everyone is shrunken and the same, sort of mushed down. I love those pictures, and I love that kind of aesthetic, because everyone’s a player.

TP Right. Like you and me.

...

RW You said the goal with Garry always was process. Not exhibition, gallery shows, or sale of prints. Did you absorb that mentality pretty much?

TP This may go way back to your first question: why no book until now? I don’t photograph for exhibition, but to engage in this process of understanding photography itself. I started to photograph because poetry was impossible for me, not realizing that photography was at least as difficult, and also not anticipating how, as with poetry, that difficulty can, in itself, create an addiction in those people who see this kind of creative test as something monumentally attractive. We all have to deal with our strengths and weaknesses, and while I guess my strength is my willingness to engage repeatedly with this deeply difficult problem of making coherent pictures, my weakness is an equally strong tendency to want everything in my pictures to be part of a perfect web—not a very healthy or often-satisfied ambition when trying to clarify such complex chunks of the visual world. But that’s my problem, and maybe something I can’t escape.

Tod Papageorge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tod Papageorge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "“ This ridiculous-seeming activity of walking along the street and lifting up a little camera is so powerful, so complicated, and so resistant to being mastered. If I had the choice between doing that and sitting in an office somewhere … Are you kidding?[2]"