Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference

Evidence

‘Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives’, Foxx observes in his evocative sleevenotes for Tiny Colour Movies. To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your own life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the – beautifully, painfully – dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien–God. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 362 (#builds-on, via linked claim)

In her important book American Archives, Shawn Michelle Smith argues that visual practices such as photographs have long served as a kind of technology of belonging, expressing the collective will at the same time that they create it. When they were first invented, photos were quickly enlisted ‘to establish social hierarchies anchored in new visual truths.’ From depictions of the physical attributes of criminals to the middle-class family shot and photos of lynchings, photographs were called upon to tell us something about gender, race, and class hierarchies. In so doing, they not only reflected what was imagined but also actively produced what they declared to exist. Photos helped an emerging middle class to affirm their place in the nineteenth century by marking who was white and middle class and who was criminal and racially other. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 157 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Viewing others’ meaning-drained objects lets us see our own urgencies as an alien would — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 362; Photographs do not merely reflect social hierarchies but actively produce them — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 157; People act largely on mediated images rather than direct experience (+2 more)

Related

• Viewing others’ meaning-drained objects lets us see our own urgencies as an alien would (similarity 0.83)
• The gap between subjects’ investment and viewers’ indifference gives old photos their melancholy charge. (similarity 0.83)
• Photographs do not merely reflect social hierarchies but actively produce them (similarity 0.82)
• Photography itself actively alters the world it records, not just passively captures it. (similarity 0.78)
• Seeing strangers’ meaningful objects induces a numinous sense of own smallness that precedes grace (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Photographs do not merely reflect social hierarchies but actively produce them #expands (0.75) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 157
• People act largely on mediated images rather than direct experience #exemplifies (0.72)
• Attention transforms raw information into images rather than choosing among made ones #corroborates (0.70) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 445