Topic #5: Immediacy

Significance: Once thought to be the most immediate medium, photography has become more about meditation, like Bresson refered to drawing. In contemporary media the viewer is more and more the participant. Photography has the amazing ability to bring unknown places and people to our attention, yet keeps them at a distance. A beautiful winter landscape can hardly reveal the freezing wind. I use photography to find invisible things in the mundane. And? Maybe what is more/equally interesting is the process of delivering these images than the images alone. It is more interesting to realize the distance that media and different processes create in order to deliver an image or a message. What is the distance which contemporary interactive media (and people themselves as participants) create from the reality represented? I really admire Wafaa Bilal's work for his take on that issue.

Quotes:

1) Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

2) Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are well known for "cinematic sculptures" - miniature film sets with lights and cameras that generate live footage. By exposing the image making apparatus along with the projected results, their work explores both time-based and physical reality.
exhibition catalog


John Tomlinson, The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy
"...in the 21st century 'immediacy', the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values."
review in Amazon

An interesting book to look up which I recently found but haven't read.

Work

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

TED Lecture by P.W. Singer