Who is "The Hooded Man"

A picture of the "Hooded Man" a victim of torture and abuse inside a prison. When it was reported that they found the man that was in the picture and it turned out to be fake. The reporter themselves fact checked hard before reporting the story but in the end it turned out false. However the man was one of the tortured and abused prisoners meaning there was more than one.

The idea of what you see is not all of it, only a part can be used in this situation. When digging into an image, there are more than one piece of evidence that leads back to the cause for taking it. Yet the reality can have lies attached to it. People wanted to know who the hooded man was, but got even more mystery from it. What we believe we see is not fact, it's individual truth.

This includes the photograph of the man holding the infamous "Hooded Man" photo. The only piece that connects him to the hooded man is out of frame, he also does not look into the camera which could be a sign of emotional guilt or something else. Yet they decided to use this photo in the report because of the mystery of his hand and his face looking down sort of. Mysteries or not, the photo makes you assume false inferences in the end.

In the end, "...photographs allow us to think we know more than we really do..." (p.19 of PDF)

- Remember that if there is a person in a photo, they are real.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response: Mark Fischer

I think what Mark Fischer is talking about can directly relate back to part of the article by Claire Bishop. Both address how nostalgia arises in the wake of future. Where Bishop paints the inherent nostalgia created by obsolescence as a hindrance to technology and art, Fischer similarly looks at how even imagining the future can create a different sort of nostalgia for the present; a "what would/could have been" which dulls the future of now. Fischer calls the result of referencing or comparing the future, "the slow cancellation of the future", which I find a bit dramatic. I don't think a disappointment that heavily weighted needs to be associated with not obtaining the outcomes of an imagination. As long as there was something enjoyed or consumed from any facet of what was imagined, there was ultimately a gain.
Read more

Capitalism and Claire Bishop’s “Digital Divide”

Although Claire Bishop’s “Digital Divide” is an interesting interpretation of Contemporary Art’s interaction (or for her argument’s sake: disavowal) of the digitization of the human existence, I do not wholeheartedly agree with it. I agree with her claim that the sudden attraction of “old media” for contemporary artists in the late 1990s coincided with the rise of “new media,” particularly the introduction of the DVD in 1997. But to be honest, this constant “return” to analog ways of doing things as a sort of “nostalgia” has happened constantly with the introduction of new technology. She claims that the art world has not really interacted with the issues that the new digital world has created. However, I believe that this digitized experience is so ubiquitous, so ingrained in us now that the need to explicitly reference this existence in every work would be unnecessary. Instead, what I found most interesting about her argument was her connection of the art world’s resistance to trul...
Read more

1984 + Rewriting the Past

First, in response to Soda Jerk's "The Anarchivist Manifesto," I feel like it's important to dissect the title before I begin analyzing the work in itself. The title is a pun by combining the words "anarchist" and "archivist". An anarchist is an individual who rejects hierarchies deemed unjust and advocates for their replacement with self-managed, self-governed societies based on voluntary, cooperative institutions. In addition, an archivist creates and maintains an archive, essentially controlling the past. The title pun hints at the crux of Soda Jerk's argument which emphasizes not only how much power images have over the past, but also even more so, how much power the individuals wield that derive the accepted narrative from those images. In response to this concentration of power, Soda Jerk advocates for the complete dissolution of this, by trying to stir a "rebellion" of the masses through the active interception, rejection, an...
Read more