EDITORIAL:
Issue 44 — Autumn 2005
Issue 44 — Autumn 2005
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When the bombs in the London underground were first reported they were soon accompanied by photographs taken on the scene by cameraphones. This seemed to suggest a new form of photojournalism, created for the first time, by people caught up in events. John Taylor looks at the role of technology in making pictures and asks what it is that makes us understand a news picture as showing reality.
A popular form of magazine picture that is rarely seriously considered, even though it is increasing prevelant, is paparazzi photography. David Bate looks at the history of this form of picture making and its involvement in our ideas of celebrity and desire.
In France photojournalism has traditionally found the greatest support and respect. Edward Welch asks what impact the reduced budgets of picture magazines and the changes in technology are having there. Can photojournalism in France reinvent itself for the modern era?
In January 1996 Carrie Levy’s father was sentenced to 51 months in prison. She documented the effects of this on her family in a series entitled 51 months. During this period she was concerned about the loss of control her father was experiencing over his identity and body. Subsequently she became interested in producing work that examined the control someone can take over another’s body. Using family and friends as models she has produced a new series Impaired that has been influenced by recent images of torture from the war in Iraq.
Paul+A’s work renegotiates the relationship between performance and its traditional photographic record, collapsing the two into a single work. Paul Jeff and Sarah Dowling (Paul+A) booked into a hotel in mid Wales for 24 hours. During their stay the pair performed and recorded 50 love scenes, ail ending in different murders. The artists attempt to invest the dispassionate record of the fictional murders with emotional and physical commitment. The scenes which they created blur the line between simulation and real experience.
Mustafa Hulusi examines our seduction by the surface values of images and the pleasures that culture offers through old myths and modem entertainment. We become suspicious of the glossy idealised images of children’s hands reaching towards flowers and the promise of paradise they seem to present. His Edenic landscapes are former colonial territories, a battleship is a family friendly tourist attraction and a pole dancer appears in front of a pastiche of neoclassical architecture. His investigation of the art of persuasion rewires art, advertising and political propoganda so that they ‘misfire’.
— Editors