Reaction to "Ararat" by Atom Egoyan

The film used narrative to hypermediate the audience, in that a film was shown within the film. The use of image as a narrative is shown within the perspective of Gorky's introduction into the film as an "added character". Gorky was placed into the storyline because his painting (and image) of the genocide from his perspective. The photograph and painting take on the role as a character within the narration. The codes of the photo progress into a storyline, revealing Gorky as a real person and subsequently telling the "true" story of the massacre. His presence within the Hollywood-drama film is not an attempt to use these first hand descriptions or narrations of the event but rather to exploit his position as a painter, drawing "truth" through image and code. Therefore, I feel as though the film as a whole develops around Gorky's image of the massacre as a painting. Contrast to the photo, the painting begins to speak of the genocide in ways the photograph never could, in that Gorky's emotional input as an artist elevated the image into a primary historical hierarchy. The blurring of the figures hands, the brush strokes and Gorky's intimacy with the event itself act as codes revealing the image as a narrative that cannot be told within a movie of the event or even a movie of a movie of the event.

Reation to "The Body and the Archive" by Allan Sekula

"Photography continued to serve the sciences, but in a less grandiose and exalted fashion, and consequently with more modest - and frequently more casual - truth claims, especially on the periphery of the social sciences."

In it's early use, photography served as a measure of hierarchy in terms of the social, physical, scientific, moral, natural and utilitarian. Every photographic represented a public moment of the individual, which objectified stereotypes through 'realistic' aesthetics. Thereafter, photographs were used as an archival tool of the bureaucrats through a system of True intelligence.

This concept of universality revealed that "photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its geometrical essence." The capacity of the Absolute photographic image revealed a universality previous media could not: written language of mathematics. Previous media was unable to replicate reality through it's physical medium, such as paint, bronze or plaster. Photography as an 'advanced' technology promised this mathematical concreteness through its process of capturing the image. Rather than human's interpretation of the physical world, a mechanical machine actualized the image. Thus, the use of social hierarchy through image was justified through these mathematical and True representations of the human body.

Thus Galton exclaimed in an essay on the "generic image" that mental images "consisted of blended images and the genera produced by his optical process." This rationalizes the human as an inadequate medium for processing and assigning social hierarchies, racial stereotypes and biological truth based solely on observational knowledge. Conversely, early photographic depiction of the physical world did, through mathematics and it's utilitarian universality. Furthermore, the photographic image as a new media "attempted to preserve the value of an older, optical model of truth in a historical context in which abstract, statistical procedures seemed to offer the high road to social truth and social control."

Reaction to "Pictures for Rent" by Abbott Miller

Miller's perception of stock photography can "offer a way of studying images as a form of currency that funds advertising." Between 1974-75 the mass media adopted photography as a control method, in that photography was recognized as an emotional and physiological function. The input of data and information within a photograph served a direct connection with the development of consumer to business relationship throughout the world. Thus, followed such corporate ideals such as branding, which looked at the consumer market as a form of a growing, marketable currency. Therefore, stock photographers were told to "shoot for 'concept' rather than 'content,' to think in terms of 'word pictures." This rise of new artistic meaning forced the photographer to produce work for an audience, market, society, boss, media, young, old, ugly, pretty, and all other stereotypes. These stereotypes were then used to control and manipulate the mass media and persuade the public into buying an image of themselves. Individuality and uniqueness were no longer valued in the realm of stock photography. Therefore, the ideology of corporations and mass media were to generalize societal structures through semiotic-rich images and resell the new 'image' of self back to the consumer. Thus creating a modern culture dependent on mass media to control and construct there visions of them'selves'.