Sunday 11 May 2014

Seeing is believing


Exercise 35 - read the WeAreOCA blog post 'Seeing is Believing' and write you own comment on the blog page and in you own blog.

Dated - 4th May 2011, a post by Jose commenting upon "the absence of visual proof of Osama Bin Laden’s death that still dominates the headlines on the BBC News website." And the poses the obvious follow up question: "In this digital age of pervasive visual illusions it seems unlikely that we would take such proof as face value?"


Were the governments were right not to release any images? I think this is an impossible question to answer, however, in my opinion the global release of such images could certainly have incited further violence, but even more importantly they would have instantaneously created another martyr - the very last thing the western world needed to create as an output from this particular war.

In the event that images had been released, would we have believed them? I think the public would have believed what they wanted to believe and rejected what didn't suit! That said, photographs, authentic (or otherwise) would have made the declaration of Bin Laden's death more real because humans rely very heavily on their most unreliable sense - sight.

[As an aside and picking up on the comments from Jose re: shamanism and Eileen re: respect/revere for blind people and the ability for people to visually manipulate the situation (and Clive on everything including mythology...); apparently university research (forget which one) has shown that, generally, people are much better at detecting lies when talking to somebody on the phone, the same lies that would go unnoticed if the people where talking face-to-face.]

To quote Sean O'Hagan's article 'Osama bin Laden's body: the world's most incendiary image'
Photography, for better or worse, possesses this immediate power in a way that words – too reflective – and the moving image – too animated – do not. It is a moment, freeze-framed forever.
Taking this thought further and taking Amano's comment (slightly out of context) 'gory images of a blood stained, probably hard to identify, body' - what format should/would the images have taken? Bloody and gory; bullet riddled; or perhaps clean and clinical taken in field mortuary after the postmortem with the Y-incision on display???? Regardless of the photograph selected for the front pages across the world, I have no doubt the image would have been seared onto the retinas of Bin Laden's flock.

[Off topic again and onto Zizek; assuming we select the final option for the photograph (the Y-incision) would this cover all three of Zizek's realities?]

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