From the beginning of my studies with the OCA, I’ve felt that I just haven’t had enough time to do everything I have to do. Where does one fit taking the photographs, writing the exercises up on the blog, reading about other aspects of photography, blogging that, and having time to assimilate what one has actually learned.
Because I don’t have an artistic or photographic background, I’ve frequently felt that I’m lost as to what other students are talking about and as a result don’t really have enough confidence to enter into discussions are either comment a great deal on other peoples’ images on flickr. To take a small step towards remedying this, I made a decision after the previous assignment to take a step back from the course handbook and focus solely on other reading in an effort to educate myself a little more. As a result, I haven’t made any progress for a few weeks in regards to the course, but have been reading heavily about photography to try and help myself.
I started this reading phase off with Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance – Photography and Political Violence, ( The University of Chicago Press, 2010), which I finally finished last night. It took me while to get through this book because, as I was reading chapters which focused on different photographers, I found myself wanting to know more about what I learned from the book and so took time out to read up on specific photographers which I’ll write up on this blog in the photographers section.
The Cruel Radiance is divided into several short essays each of which focus on a particular photographer / photographers. For example, there is a section on Robert Capa, which leads nicely on to section about James Nachtwey, which is followed in turn by the author’s thoughts on Giles Peress. Each chapter gave me plenty to think about and follow up on, and a result introduced me to other strands which I followed up on. The whole process kept going and going and made me realize I need to refine my actual study technique in order to keep track of information.
The book is on the People and Place recommended reading list, although I had no idea what to expect when I first opened it. Naturally, from the title, you know it’s not going to be light reading, but despite the fact that I could only read it in smallish chunks before I got too depressed, I was hooked from the beginning.
Susie Linfield is an associate professor of journalism at New York University, so she knows how to write with impact and it hit me hard. Throughout the book, she challenges the opinion that photographs of political violence and wars are exploitative and voyeuristic, and tries to get the point across that in order to understand the modern history of violence, it’s necessary to view these images and see the people in them, despite how hard and uncomfortable it may be for us to examine the depths of human cruelty. I gathered from the book that nobody likes these images, nobody enjoys the images, and nobody actually even wants to look at them, but we have to in order to help us understand the cruelty and immorality in our world.
To honest, with images like these, I guess there is some kind of morbid satisfaction (but certainly not enjoyment) from viewing the images, and for the most part I’m guilty of looking at them and thinking selfishly, ‘Thank God I’m not living through that’, but not actually doing anything about it, and I would think that many people would be the same. The Cruel Radiance, however forces the reader to look more closely at what’s going on in the image, and wonder whether we should be doing more to stop the many atrocities in our world. Because it is our world. Despite the fact that we may be sitting thousands of miles away looking at the images in the book, it’s still the world that we live in even though we’re not physically there the location where the image was taken. If we are going to alleviate suffering, we have to understand it, and we can’t understand it without looking.
There were some sections in this book where I just had to stop and think about what I was reading about. There were other parts that almost had me in tears. All the way through the book, I found myself wondering how a human being could do some of things shown in the images in the book, or described in writing, to another person, and the truly terrible thing is that, certainly in modern history and the work of James Nachtwey or Don McCullin for example, there’s no reason behind all the suffering. Sometimes there is no political or religious agenda, there’s just human cruelty.
This is a fascinating book I learned a lot from, and it sent me looking further into other photojournalists and war photographers, what they went through to capture images and how they live with it today, but i’ll write about this in a separate post.
My People and Place Learning Log 
I think that was/is a good plan but share with you recognition of that need to keep reading more and then the realisation that more focus is needed. So difficult to find the right balance.
Hi Catherine,
Yes, it’s very difficult to find the balance. I find myself doing bits and pieces of a range of things, and then forgetting where I got to. Focusing on a particular thing should help with that, but does slow progress through the course down. I think my next plan will be to make an actual printed study schedule which I’ll have to stick to and try not to get disturbed by other things.