Write a two page, double-spaced answer to one of the following questions, drawing on information from class lectures as well as any additional research you may have done (including the supplementary E-Reserves readings for this class). You must provide references for any citations or quotes from books, articles or the internet. It is a violation to reproduce un-cited material in your own essays.

1. The video Stranger with a Camera (which you viewed on Thursday, November 5) suggests that looking at, and documenting, another person is an inherently political act (an act in which one person seeks to exercise some power or control over another person, or their image). This relationship is made even more complex when the person being photographed or filmed is already disempowered in some way relative to the viewer or photographer (e.g., through poverty or suffering). At the same time there is a long tradition of using the social documentary process to call attention to, and improve, conditions of poverty or suffering. We discussed these issues in some detail during our lectures on social documentary photography. Pick a contemporary or historical example of documentary practice (from television, film or photographs in books or magazines, etc.) and describe the ways in which these two tendencies (the impulse to “take” someone else’s image and the desire to help them or alleviate their suffering) interact with, and complicate, each other.

2. During our lectures on Constructivism in the USSR and Dadaism in Germany we discussed attempts by artists such as Alexandr Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and John Heartfield to create images that would “de-familiarize”(pch 235-259) the world for viewers, by revealing the ways in which natural or given forms of meaning (photographic “truth,” for example, or the authority of political leaders) are constructed and contingent (dependent on context, the specificity of the medium, political manipulation, etc.). Identify a contemporary photographic artist (working during the past twenty years) who seeks to “de-familiarize” reality in some way. What techniques does he or she employ? How is their work related to the longer tradition of de-familiarization and “making strange” discussed in class?

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