http://www.cbc.ca/correspondent/060423.html On Sunday night, while suffering a bout of insomnia, I stayed up late watching this, a documentary about iconic press images. One of the ideas I found most interesting was that many of our "iconic" images closely match major art traditions of the western world (e.g. Christian imagery in the famous Abu Ghraib photos or the migrant mother as Mary Magdelene). One of the people interviewed for the documentary remarked that photojournalists are informed by the western tradition of art, and therefore their eyes are drawn to capture scenes that match this tradition: "Because when these photographers are in the process of composing them, what they're calling on in their mind's eye is a history of imagery with which they're all familiar and various compositional rules that often are derived from the history of art." And we, as consumers of these media images, recognize their power because we too are informed by this same tradition.
posted by Tina on 4/25/2006 | 0 comments | #