Arnheim, Gestalt and Media by Ian Verstegen

Author:Ian Verstegen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030029708
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Fig. 5.2Sabrina Harman from Abu Ghraib

In these two cases, the “authentic” images that seem to be transparent, yet the Hocker photo, “Here there are blackberries,” was shot just miles from Auschwitz on a day that over one hundred people were executed upon their arrival. Oppositely, Bohlinger considers Errol Morris’ argument that the horrifying banality of the thumbs-up photos of the U. S. Army specialist masks their evidentiary role in exposing torture in the American-held prisons in Iraq. Each photo has a misleading quality in each case, a pleasant image masks horror and a horrific image masks a much bigger problem into which a hapless individual has been thrust.

Photographs, and stationary media, are not self-evident even when they involve mechanical reproduction. In this light, consider the opinion of journalist Philip Gourevitch, who writes of the Abu Ghraib photos: “Crime-scene photographs, for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation.”2 Ontology is the only way to gain some traction on such problems. This point of view will be rigorously defended using the tools of ontology.

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