Cameras, iPhones & Instagrams: Reshaping our worldview
Yesterday I went to see the new Dorthea Lange exhibit at the
Oakland museum and was pretty much left speechless by the raw power of
her photographs. "She would expose a roll of film, send it off to
Washington DC to be developed, and then wait for it to come back.
Sometimes it was months before she could see how her photos turned
out." http://museumca.org/gallery/dorothea-lange-politics-seeing#slide-0-field_phot_gallery-4131
Today we can see within seconds how our photos have turned out -- and,
thanks to FaceBook, Instagram and SnapChat, half the world can see how
our photos turned out too.
This new and sudden flood of millions of images that wash over us daily
might be both a good thing and a bad thing. It's bad because
individual photos have now lost the intense power and magic that came
with the exceptional and stark rarity of a great photo such as ones that
Lange took.
The gut-wrenching reality of Lange's photos moved an entire
generation to take immediate action to stop the horrors of the Great
Depression. And the stoic and tragic faces of children in her photos of
Japanese-Americans being forcefully dragged off to concentration camps
like so many cattle also made Americans realize just how vulnerable all
of us are and to move us as a nation to apologize for this injustice.
"First they came for the...." And now they could come for us too. https://www.facebook.com/firsttheycameforthehomeless/
Back in the day, Lange made everyone who saw her photographs suddenly
realize how vulnerable we all are, and this effect of her photos is true
even now -- because even now, despite all our totally cool scientific
developments and technological inventions since then, we still are as
vulnerable. Lose a house? Lose a job? We could be dead within weeks
-- perhaps even within days. Lange's haunting images of women and
children on the brink of starvation and ruin remind us of this -- that
even White Americans back then could be so easily and completely
betrayed by Deep State banksters and carpetbaggers. And that this
vulnerability that Lange forced Americans to confront in the 1930s is
true for her photos even now, 70 years later.
But the good news is that now Dorthea Lange isn't the only one out there who is
exposing us to the intense vulnerability of mankind, a vulnerability to all
kinds of natural disasters and human-created assaults on both our here-and-now and on our future -- day after
day, year after year.
Let's hear it for Dorthea Lange of course -- but let's also hear it for
all our modern iPhones, Instagram, FaceBook and digital camera users as
well. Slowly but surely, we too are bringing a face to the troubles and
woes assaulting human beings daily even now and, like Lange, we too are
serving as the conscience of a nation, a nation of people who are just
plain lucky to be as well-off as we are, a nation that needs to
remember, "There but for fortune go you and I".
PS:
This September, I will be taking my trusty Canon PowerShot to the
Middle East -- and hope to capture some of the horrors of
destabilization over there as a result of the American carpetbaggers and
war-mongers who have turned that entire part of the globe into either a
fiery inferno or a ravished hulk. Perhaps I too may in my own small
way sway the American conscience into finally putting a stop to all the
freaking bloody disasters that our very own Wall Street and War Street
are causing over there -- and that we, the American people, are
ultimately responsible for and have paid for in blood money. "First they came for
the Middle East..." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47507.htm
PPS:
Photographers aren't the only artists who force us to look at the
vulnerability of humans. Writers do also -- starting with those
Biblical guys who wrote about the compassion of Jesus, something you
really don't see all that much in America any more, especially not in
the Bible Belt.
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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books! http://straitwellbooks.blogspot.com/2016/04/our-top-best-seller-right-now-is-bring.html
Plus here's a sneak preview of my latest book, a thrilling murder mystery entitled "Road Trip to Damascus," hopefully coming out by the end of 2017: http://straitwellbooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/new-book-by-straitwell-press-coming-out.html
Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books! http://straitwellbooks.blogspot.com/2016/04/our-top-best-seller-right-now-is-bring.html
Plus here's a sneak preview of my latest book, a thrilling murder mystery entitled "Road Trip to Damascus," hopefully coming out by the end of 2017: http://straitwellbooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/new-book-by-straitwell-press-coming-out.html