Mediacology

Jacqueline Hassink explores sacred spaces of multinational capitalism: boardrooms of banks and corporations, and fitting rooms of haute couture. The above image is from Nestle’s boardroom. What strikes me about it is the far wall, which is the old Mercator map projection originally designed for shipping. In essence it’s a colonial map because of the obvious [...]

No doubt, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi wasn’t the final word on cinematography’s powerful capacity to depict the environmental consequences of our modern world. With Manufactured Landscapes comes Jennifer Baichwal’s depiction of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s stunning images of industry in China. If it’s true that what is not mediated doesn’t exist, we can say now that at [...]

© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

As a cultural meme, photos of the so-called “lost” tribe of the Amazon circulated more rapidly in the mediasphere than electrons buzzing through duel processors. But now that the images have been revealed to be a “hoax,” we should kick back in our collective armchairs and probe what happened. To be clear, the [...]

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How photos support your own “reality” – Machinist – Salon.com:
In the decades since Kennedy’s death, we’ve achieved photographic ubiquity. Today, billions of tiny cameras record everything, and broadcast it all immediately online. The world, now, is constantly watched, each of us Zapruder himself.
Strangely, though, all these images have not pushed us toward greater collective agreement [...]

Ya think the Earth is telling us something? The Atlanta tornado.

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I just completed my first Slidecast, which is a combination of a PowerPoint with narrated audio. It’s about eight minutes long dealing with the theme of propaganda, war photos, film and popular culture. I hope you like it. More to come!

You can read my latest column on war, pictures and propaganda at Understand Media. Link follows.
Understand Media -> Articles -> War Pictures by Antonio Lopez:
Regardless of your opinions about the reasons for going to war in Iraq, the Bush Administration has relied heavily on media management and imagery to justify and promote its cause. Whether [...]

Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the [...]

The votes are in. Streetsy has posted the most popular photos of street art in 2007. The winner is……

“muck on ludlow”
But I like this one the best:

“unknown, nolita”

Technorati Tags: streetsy

Truth Digg has this little reminder of how photography can translate wishful thinking into the subliminal:

Some photos documenting my obsession with street art. This set is from the streets of Rome.

Today I photographed this image from the cover of an old book being sold at my local produce market in Rome. It’s from the late fifties.

With the Greek statue of Victory at Ancient Olympia surrounded by fire, we see a perfect visual metaphor for the state of our world. From where I write I can see the island of neighboring Sicily and the smoke from fires that have been raging here in Calabria for the past couple of weeks. With [...]

It’s hard to say what NYC Mayor Bloomberg has jammed up his you-know-what, but my guess is that the proposed new restrictions for small film crews and photographers in Manhattan may appease his friendly allies in Big Media who will be covering his not-yet-ready-for-primitime presidential bid. Here is a brief preview of the rules:
The Mayor’s [...]

Photo by Tony de Marco
I have only been to one place in the world where there is no advertising: Cuba. But if you include propaganda in that category, it’s in ample ample supply. Still, you have no idea how refreshing it is to be in a place without ads because in cities like New York [...]

I just love this photo spread, and this image of Jason Rowe in particular, of avatars and their creators. Click here for the link.

I was once on a panel with Lance Strate. He is a thoughtful, smart media ecology expert who recently wrote a provocative blog on the Virginia Tech murders. He is not the first to equate guns with cameras (Susan Sontag and Paul Virilio have each made the connection on a deep level), but I thought [...]

One of the primary propaganda techniques used by politicians is to stage photos, especially in the Bush White House. The ideas is to put the President in the context of other visual imagery, be it Mount Rushmore or in front of a portrait of George Washington. The most famous is placing Bush underneath the “MIssion [...]

Here’s an image from the New York Post editorial: “A Dark Globalism.” It was the featured image in the print version. You have to click through the embedded slide show to get to the picture. It reminds me of the wicked kid trope in recent horror films, as if Muslim children are inherently evil. This [...]