Galina and Alexei (Ikarushka) Premium user United States Chicago, Illinois

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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
9:48 AM

Kris Cohen on Ordinary Photography   

Kris completed a one-year ESRC project about ordinary photography and the Internet, entitled "Photos Leave Home". From that (old) blog: "My broadest interest is to understand how ordinary photography (all of our clamorous photos of cats and parties and weddings and babies and torture, so visible of late), considered in its omnipresence, potentializes new forms of public life and public knowing... Is it clear what an omnipresent photography makes knowable and what it forces into secrecy? Whether that omnipresence is a becoming or a being? In any case, two contemporary phenomena, one as grotesque as the other is banal, seem to literalize some part of Sontag's concern: on the side of the remarkably unremarkable are photoblogs, flickr.com, and commercial photography sites like kodakgallery.com and shutterfly.com, witnesses to an eruption of intimate photography, out of photo albums and into visibility; on the side of the grotesquely banal are the Abu Ghraib photographs, through which banality erupts as a traumatic event. "
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