Some lovely folks asked me to be on an ICA panel that would deal with issues in vernacular photography. Heres something Im working on. Proposed title: From My Medium to Your Message: Memes and the Ethics of the Grab, Lately, Ive been thinking about what happens when peoples online photos are taken without permission and turned into memes that deliver a very different message that the original creator intended. Here are some examples: petapixel/2012/11/01/how-my-family-photo-turned-into-an-internet-meme/ buzzfeed/ryanhatesthis/a-blogger-discovered-the-selfie-she-took-at-the-hair-salon-w xojane/issues/my-picture-was-stolen-and-turned-into-a-fat-shaming-anti-feminist-meme whatdoyoudodear/stop-thief-that-time-someone-memed-my/ My talk, which might have a title like From My Medium to Your Message: Memes and the Ethics of the Grab, would use instances like those above in order to articulate the usefulness of three relatively new ways of thinking about photography in new media settings: 1. Limor Schiffmans work on the logic of meme structures 2. Paul Froshs writing on the phenomenology of the gestural image 3. My own work regarding the politics of the grab in new media (a politics I believe differs from those embedded in older media forms, such as the cinematic gaze and the televisual glance.) To me, memes are a really powerful means through which research the politics of fun. In memes that includes photos of humans, power issues are foregrounded, as are notions of agency (is the person in the photograph the subject of the meme? the object of the meme?) In memes featuring photos of humans that go viral, social trails are relatively easy to detect: a researcher can quickly assess the parties who were amused, interested, upset and so fort, via likes, up-votes, complaints, blog posts and so forth. Taking an approach that combines semiotic and narrative analysis, Im interested in thinking about these particular memes as spacial structures in which three versions of reality dialogue: the version imagined by photographers; the version created by everyday users of the internet; and the version where questions of ethics reside.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 08:13:36 +0000
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