This blog post engages media representations over the past week with attention to the role and the rights of citizen journalists who offered live-stream videos, images with very different frames from those offered by corporate media. But, a new patent issued to Apple this week for ‘infrared emitters’ will make it possible to shut down iPhone cameras in moments of crisis. As Julie Mastrine, author of the petition that asks Apple not to share this technology with law enforcement officials, says: "The release of this technology would have huge implications, including the censoring of political dissidents, activists, and citizens who are recording police brutality." Please read, share, and sign the petition.
Against an older view of war photography that images of brutality and suffering will surely unite people of good will—“us”—against violence, Susan Sontag observes that we cannot take for granted the “we” when the subject at hand is looking at other people’s pain. This would neglect the cultural frame of interpretation—what can be depicted, which lives can be grieved, what is interesting, abject, or salacious within a given historical moment. According to Sontag, then, photographs in and of themselves cannot offer understanding of what they depict (which is the work of narrative); rather, she writes, they “do something else: they haunt us.”
