Today was his eleventh visit to the ziggurat. ‘Beats the Luxor,’ he said with a smile, referring to Vegas and not the Upper
Nile.”
Real events are staged and harvested for their images, turned into performances whether it is a presidential encounter, a so-called
reality TV show (dramaturgically structured to the same degree as any theatre play) or web disseminated day-to-day details of ordinary people. The tendency
to merge reality and fiction is met by a similar movement from the opposite pole. Docu-dramas abound where people might be excused for not being able
to distinguish between fact and fiction, historical accuracy and political myth. There are many cases where film stills are used to illustrate newspaper
articles on historical topics on the presumption that it adds immediate visual interest with a high recognition factor - few people would recognize a
photograph of T. E. Lawrence, substantially more would recognize Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. The power of this melding of fact and fiction,
image and reality, should not be underestimated. Having booked his ticket on that fateful September 11th (but before the actual events took place) Neil
Godfrey arrived at Philadelphia International airport a month afterwards to catch his flight.
“As he passed through the metal detector, an airport security guard furrowed his brow at Godfrey’s reading selections as they disappeared
through the conveyor belt. On the cover of the book, Hayduke Lives! by Edward Abbey, is an illustration of a man’s hand holding several sticks of dynamite.
He proceeded through the security checkpoint and sat down to read near his boarding gate. About 10 minutes had passed when a National Guardsman approached
Godfrey. ‘He told me to step aside,’ Godfrey says. |
 |
 ‘Then
he took my book and asked me why I was reading it.’ Within minutes, Godfrey says, Philadelphia Police officers, Pennsylvania State Troopers and airport
security officials joined the National
Guardsman... ”
He was told he could not fly and asked to leave the airport. The next day when he tried to fly he was again refused. Later he was informed
it because he had made a joke about bombs (which he denies and which in any case would be a custodial offence).
With the advent of Photoshop, digital cameras, video and mobile phones with web cameras, a new era of image making and reception began.
We have entered an epoch of “post-photography,” to
use the term invented by Mitchell, and with the technologies of image manipulation within reach of most people in the West, can no longer differentiate
reliably between original and copy, reality or a staged or even simulated version of it. Neither can we assume the intention of either the image maker
or the image user. For example, around the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib, a situation developed which illustrates what I propose. There were photographs
depicting the indisputably real abuses of the prisoners. |
