5.9 Harrell Fletcher. The American War. 2005

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Из курса от партнера The Museum of Modern Art

Seeing Through Photographs

1986 оценки

The Museum of Modern Art

Seeing Through Photographs

1986 оценки

Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate. This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180 year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever increasingly visual culture. Learning Objectives • Develop skills to better examine and understand the differences between photographs and photographic images. • Discover how context influences the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. • Learn about different modes of artistic and technological experimentation and innovation in photography. • Investigate photography’s role in our increasingly visual culture.

Из урока

Constructing Narratives & Challenging Histories

Learn to look critically at the way photographs have been used to construct narratives that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

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5.8 Thomas Demand. Room (Zimmer). 19961:03

5.9 Harrell Fletcher. The American War. 20054:40

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Sarah Meister
Curator
Department of Photography

My name is Harrell Fletcher and I live in Portland, Oregon.

In 2005 I was in Vietnam as part of an international artists residency.

And I was interested in learning about the Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam War.

One of the first things I found out was that in Vietnam it's referred to as

the American War, which was kind of an eye opener for me.

I was referred to a museum in Ho Chi Minh City or

Saigon called the War Remnants Museum.

So I went there and I was really blown away, really affected by what I saw.

There is a primary exhibition of about 100 photographs with didactic text

that explains what's going on in them both in English and in Vietnamese.

And it goes through the ten year US military involvement there and

then the aftermath of that, and uses a combination of probably unapproved

reprints of US and other international magazines' and newspapers' photographs.

So, photographs from Life magazine that were basically just rephotographed.

And then, photographs by Vietnamese documentary photographers as well.

I just went through with a low tech digital camera and

re-photographed all of the images in the exhibition and all of the text.

Other people were photographing the images as well.

And actually on the first day that I went there, I remember thinking,

why are these people taking photographs of these photos?

It seems really strange to me.

But then when I went back, I went through and methodically photographed all of them.

To get a consistent set of photographs, I actually needed to use my flash.

But then if I was to photograph the images straight on,

then the flash would sort of obliterate the image.

And so I had to take the photographs obliquely from a slight angle.

Initially, I was a little concerned about that and

was trying to figure out how reduce it.

But I think even as I was taking the photographs

I realized that there was something interesting about it.

That there was both formal elements that were interesting.

This little explosion that was occurring in a lot

of the photographs where this white spot of flash would occur.

And I was also showing a little bit of the context of the museum.

There wasn't always cutting off the wall behind it or the frame.

By showing that in the final presentation and not trying to edit those out or

clean it up so that it looked like the original photograph, that I'm indicating

that these are photographs that someone's looking at and that I'm looking at.

That became important to me conceptually.

The viewer of my project,

the American War, is looking at me looking at photographs.

The combination of image and text is really important to me.

I also thought it was just interesting to look at how the information

was being presented.

What exactly was the text that the museum was choosing to go along with

these images.

There's some subjectivity going on, and

there's historical errors that occur, and that, to me, is also interesting.

The voice of an institution that gets to be an authority.

I decided that I would try to get the exhibition to travel.

And so from Texas in went to Richmond, Virginia, and

then to Massachusetts, and to New York as well as a few other locations.

And in each of the places, I would also try to organize a public event for

each of the exhibitions in which local people that's in protesters, and

immigrants, and historians would come and talk about their experiences.

Part of what I was interested in was that the war in Iraq and

Afghanistan were going on, and my sense was that somehow we'd forgotten

something about what it occurred in Vietnam that allow that to occur.

And many of the images where echoing the events going on in the Middle East.

So for instance, water boarding was a big issue at that time.

And there was an image of US soldiers waterboarding

a Vietnamese person in the field.

Also because there had been a lot of censorship around images from Iraq and

Afghanistan, it seem like this was a way of looking at what was going on there

by examining historical documents about a previous war.

It was in some ways an activist artwork that allowed me to

delve deeply into this concern that I had

around what was going on with the military during the Bush administration.

So in some ways it was like a personal education project that was being done in

a very public way.

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