A Tribute to Walker Evans

I've been researching the work of Walker Evans who is considered one of the greatest social documentary photographers of the 20th century. Although he abandoned the candid moments in the tradition of Henri Cartier Bresson, Evans would return to a place with a large format camera and capture the essence of our culture through the presentation of artifacts within the landscape.

Lloyd Fonvielle writes about Evan's work that is published by Aperture and describes it as a vision of American poverty that is unlike European poverty which had been romanticized in the work of Atget, but rather a "poverty of culture" whereby our architecture may refer to european style but is cheaply built in an industrial age by a young country that has chosen to litter the landscape with advertising in pursuit of the wealth of the "American Dream."

I have always been drawn to this type of imagery due to my own blue collar roots and family mythology of working, traveling, and working some more. As I look around Spokane I am fascinated by place names that reflect wealth, power, and happiness and yet are far from it. In neighborhoods of every kind we see the all too common white picket fence that illustrates our pursuit of the American dream, although if you look closer you see emblems of alternative beliefs and politics.

These photographs were taken primarily around Sunset Blvd, Government Way, and Inland Empire Way which connects Highway 2 and the Latah neighborhoods. I have included a couple of previous photos from the South Hill and the lower East Side along the Internet just to sparkle some extremities to my portrait of Spokane.

Sunset Blvd is a street filled with old motels and apartments that have been usurped by larger hotels near the airport. These photographs are like a cross between the Brat Pack 60's and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Today these are often used as flop houses for a transient population. I also photographed the Latah neighborhood which runs along Inland Empire Way. This neighborhood is a modern reflection of the 20th century challenges for the working class. And finally to complete my patchwork quilt of Americana, I revisited some rural areas within a few of miles of our downtown core.

The final image is the last remaining film store in Spokane and seemed appropriate for this photographic project.

Creating A Memory

I'm taking a class in visual storytelling. We recently watched the film "After Life" that was about this idea where when you die you go to a place where you get to spend a week deciding what memory you would like to take with you into the after life. The newly departed spend a week thinking about what their most important memory is that they would like to remember and it is recreated for them just like a movie being filmed on a set. I was asked to think of a memory from my life and to recreate it in a similar way.

One of my fondest memories involves my 10th birthday when I received a 22 rifle for a present. As a kid we spent almost every weekend camping, fishing, and hunting. When I received my very own rifle I felt so proud and grown up. When my great aunt and uncle passed away all of our outdoor activities stopped. The last time I handled a rifle was when I was 16. My father and I used to love to go hunting just to go for a hike in the crisp fall air. We never shot anything and I have never killed a deer, but the memories are so special to me.

I asked my parents to come down to my property to recreate this memory. I used my son to stand in for me. My father still had my old 22 rifle so we were able to put together images that feel so real and yet are totally staged. My dad used to wear a wool hunting hat and I used to borrow his filson wool coat. They're both gone now but I did have my dad wear my wool hat and my son wore one of my flannel shirts. You can just make out that the shirt is just a little big on him.

The black and white photographs create a sense of nostalgia and look as though they could have been taken back in 1979. After creating the images of the shooting my family and I sat around the dining table and I decided to photograph my son and parents with the beautiful window light filtering through the late afternoon. I think the image of my son standing proudly against the chair expresses the pride I felt on that special birthday. Afterwards, I printed out some of the images and thought of how I could encapsulate the whole experience by photographing my hand holding the nostalgic photograph.

Photography is not reality, but it is a way of representing our memories with tremendous detail in a way that let's us take only what we want to recall with us.

The Importance of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Experiments

"If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must...intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses."
Henri Matisse



The development of photography can be traced back to the failed attempts by William Henry Fox Talbot to draft the beauty of the landscape at Lake Como by hand in 1833. “How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible? I asked myself.”

Although photography is often described and evaluated in comparison to the traditional arts, it was at this moment the power of photography as an objective expression was envisioned. “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature”

William Henry Fox Talbot would draw upon his knowledge of mathematics, botany, physics, chemistry, and optics to develop the photographic process from which modern photography originates and by which the world was transformed into a cult of image.


Talbot would write of his invention, “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.” His earliest efforts involved the making of “photogenic drawings” by coating paper with silver nitrate that would turn black when exposed to light and setting upon it a leaf whose outline would be perfectly traced. Unfortunately these early images would darken and fade over time. He determined that treating the silver in iodine rendered it no longer light sensitive, essentially “fixing” a permanent image. Use of salt to enhance sensitivity along with the use of Gallic acid to induce the hidden image to reveal itself would allow for shorter exposures and the development of the latent image, (a concept known since the earliest developments of secret “invisible ink”). The new faster emulsion combined with the use of a camera obscura allowed Talbot to explore his world and reveal it’s photogenic qualities.

One cannot overlook the significance of the timing of this invention. Knowledge of the “natural” elements of photography were previously known generations before, but to pursue controlling and manipulating these elements would be venturing into the “black arts” associated with evil. Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered the effect of light on silver salts in 1775 but it was not published until 1827. Talbot acknowledged this when he described his invention in 1839, he said, “It is a little bit of magic realized: of natural magic. You make the powers of nature work for you, and no wonder that your work is well and quickly done… But after all what is nature, but one great field of wonders past our comprehension.” Photography is thought to have been inconceivable until science was able to break away from religion. There is still magic in photography, and a spirituality within Talbot’s own descriptions of his efforts . Photography, it seems, embodies the natural and supernatural.


While the casual observer may dismiss his early photographs as being banal or limited to scientific inquiry or artistic mimicry, a review of Talbot’s work reveals a sophisticated mind and artistic spirit. Most importantly, we see in Talbot’s images the very essence of the medium that is described by John Szarkowski as “windows and mirrors”. We not only see the fastidious details of the Victorian era, but we see the photographers place within this space and time through the vantage point of the lens. Talbot understood the essence of photographic vision.

The photograms and subsequent photographs by Talbot of the English countryside can be compared to the masterful work of Man Ray and the surrealist movement as well as Laslo Maholy-Nagy whose work is closely tied to the Bauhaus movement.

Maholy-Nagy has articulated Talbort’s accomplishment by delineating the change of perception brought about by photography through the articulation of eight photographic visions:

• Abstract
• Exact
• Rapid (Action is Frozen)
• Slow (Movement is spread over time)
• Intensified
• Microphotography
• Filter photography to bring out hidden details (I.e. UV Haze filter, Red contrast filter for sky)
• Penetrative (Xray, Radiography)
• Simultaneous
• o Transparent superimposition

One cannot imagine our perception of the world without photography. Marshall McLuhan described the impact of any new medium is not so much in its content, but in its impact on society and culture. By 1860’s the world had millions of photographs – only 25 years after the initial invention. When viewed within this context, Talbot’s experiments are as significant as Gutenberg’s.

It seems as if, through his experiments with photography, that Talbot recognized the world was moving faster and was destined to change at a pace approaching the speed of the very light that was the subject of his images. He would write of his work, "The whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way."

Talbot’s negative/positive process of reproduction is the basis for photocopying, photogravure (which Karel Klic based upon Talbot’s research), and photo silkscreening which is used to manufacturer the computer chips and circuit boards that modern life is so dependent upon.

To measure the impact of the negative/positive photographic process we need only look at the writings of Paul Valery and Walter Benjamin while comparing the Calotype to the Daguerreotype.

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931

While Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre simultaneously developed an alternative photographic process whose acuity and subtlety is still unmatched, it is Fox Talbot soft, fibrous prints that set modern culture in motion. When examined with Walter Benjamin’s seminal article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in mind, you can see that the Daguerreotype retains its aura through its one-of-a-kind originality while the Calotype and its progeny have gone on to define popular mass culture. The cult value of unique art objects such as sculpture and painting is exceeded by the exhibition value of images that are mechanically reproduced in such mass as to actually contribute to the formation of culture. Surely a man so astute as to be able to decipher cuneiform script and who launched a publishing business had some ambition towards cultural authority.

When considering the origins of the medium of photography, there is one name that stands out as having lasting impact, William Henry Fox Talbot. One cannot look at modern culture, nor the beauty of nature, without feeling influenced by his legacy.


Sources:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ in Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books 1969)

Burnett-Brown, A., Haworth-Booth, M., @ Roberts, R. “Specimens and Marvels: The Invention of Photography.” Aperture 161 (2000): 4-79.

A Little Bit of Magic Realized: William Fox Talbot’s Discovery. DVD. Fims for the Humanities & Science (2004)

McLuhan, M. “Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man”. (New York: McGraw-Hill 1964)

The Changing Media Landscape

This is a video I produced of a panel discussion held in Spokane Washington about the impact the Internet is having on our local legacy media and journalism in particular.

The panelist included:
Ryan Pitts, Spokesman Review Newspaper
Luke Baumgarten, Pacific Northwest Inlander Weekly
John Orr, KYRS Radio
Cheryl-Anne Milsap, Spokane Metro Magazine
James McPherson, Professor at Whitworth University

A Comparison of Digital & Traditional Photography

Digital photography (also referred to as Digital Imaging) and traditional film based photography are similar but distinctly separate mediums.

Digital imaging may utilize a paradigm similar to traditional film based photography, but as Fred Ritchin writes in his book “After Photography” digital photography is a Trojan Horse of sorts that deserves to be understood as a distinct media unlike traditional photography.

To understand the differences between digital and traditional photography we need to remind ourselves that there is always a distinction between what we see and what we know. We see the sun go around the earth but we know the earth rotates around the sun (Berger). When we look at a digital camera we see what appears at first glance to be a camera complete with shutter and aperture controls. Digital point and shoot cameras even add a film advance sound effect to complete the disguise. The digital camera has more in common with a video camera than a film based camera. The formation of an image is not a physical process where light creates the latent image through the modification of silver halide crystals. Instead photons are simply counted and tabulated as data that is easily revised and edited without any trace.

In trying to analyze the discrete differences between photography and digital imaging based upon a photographic paradigm I found myself making comparisons between the John Szarkowski’s book “the Photographer’s Eye” and Fred Ritchin’s book “After Photography”. Szarkowski describes the attributes of photography with these five characteristics:

1. The thing itself. – Photographs deal with the actual subject before the camera.
2. The detail. – Photography is tied to the facts of things. It has “compelling clarity”
3. The Frame. – A photograph is selected, not conceived. The photographer’s subject is never self-contained. The edges of the photograph surround what the photographer saw as being most important, but in reality the subject extended beyond the frame. By isolating the subject or subjects from their surroundings new relationships are formed. A person walking down the street who has no relation to anyone else in the seen is suddenly forced into a visual relationship with the person sitting on the stoop because the photographer has chosen to frame the two together.
4. Time – Photographs are time exposures and describe discrete parcels of time. “While freezing time, the photographer “discovered that there was a pleasure and a beauty in this fragmenting of time that had little to do with what was happening. It had rather to do with the seeing the patterning of lines and shapes previously concealed.” Cartier-Bresson called this approach to seeing “the decisive moment”.
5. Vantage point. - Photographs provide us new views of the world. Think of aerial photography, macro photography.

In contrast to Szarkowski, Ritchin argues that digital photography no longer serves what Susan Sontag describes as a “stenographic function”. Whereas Roland Barthes argued that photography was limited to its denotative meaning a “message without a code”, digital photography shares more in common with appropriation art that combines visual elements so seamlessly that one could take preexisting images from a vacation destination and digitally insert their family into the image so perfectly so as to not even need to bother bringing a camera along for the trip!

The pixel based image is one that is not fixed. It is data that can be copied, replaced, destroyed, or removed from its context altogether and recombined with other data. It is infinitely reproducible without generation loss and therefore lacks verifiable orgin.

Szarkowski and Ritchin both agree that traditional photography is tied to the facts of things. Ritchin explans, “the photograph, with its mechanical bias, was seen as such a useful arbiter of reality”. Barthes offered that a photograph supplied irrefuteable facts that the subject existed before the lens. However, many a contemporary YouTube video has demonstrated that an artist utilizing pixel editing software can recreate a photographic illusion that may be output back to traditional photographic material without any ability to be authenticated. It is perhaps here that Ritchin paints the bleakest and most profound difference between digital and traditional photography. Ritchin points out that digital photography has been around for over thirty years and the first widely published example of a digitally modified image that was suppose to represent fact was the 1982 National Geographic cover image of the pyramids in Egypt. The original photograph was altered to arrange two pyramids closer together. We have observed numerous examples of the crisis in journalism as standards of representation have slid in the face of our technological ability to construct the image we imagine rather than the one that was in front of the camera for the split moment the shutter was released.

This moves us to the third distinction between Szarkowski’s definition of traditional photography and digital photography. A traditional photography is selected through framing, not conceived. Digital photography offers the imagemaker unlimited ability to construct an image. Fred Ritchin writes, “Increasingly, much of the photographic process will occur after the shutter is released. The photograph becomes the initial research, an image draft, as vulnerable to modification as it has always been to recontextualization.”

Traditional photography has always been tied to a moment in time. A signifier of the death of the person portrayed, an optically perfect representation of history. Digital photography on the other hand is completely displaced from time and context. Historic images may be combined with new and vice versa. Perfect duplication removes the certainty of orgin or authorship, and the ability to construct the imagined image removes photography from its past or present and offers us a means for expressing the future. One need only suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy a CGI movie at a theatre that portrays the imagined future to see the potential for perfect illusion.

The final comparison to Szarkowski concerns vantage point. While one could argue that digital shares the same aspect of vantage point when it starts with a camera based image acquisition, but I also think of vantage point as being related to context and the testimony of the photographer that the photograph is a record of what they saw. Digital photography with its indeterminate authorship, is completely without fixed context. A digital photograph can take the subject of an image and place it in a completely different context, much as a photograph that is originally presented in a gallery with a caption that explains the event depicted can be maliciously presented in a magazine article. Images like Sally Mann’s photographs of her children can be dislocated from their original context and be recoded as pornography by cultural groups that would utilize it this way. A photograph by Ansel Adams suddenly becomes part of an advertisement for a vacation housing development.

Whereas Szarkowski stated we can look at photographs as “mirrors and windows”. Mirrors tell us about the artist and Windows tell us about the world. I think digital photography is limited to being a reflection of the artist and the imagined world. I find myself seeing digital photography as being a process that has reduced the average person’s world view to that of simulation. We are living in a time where the average person with their myspace and facebook accounts is surrounding by mirrors that reflect back whatever desire and pleasure we imagine, predominantly in the “perfect image” world of cinema and visual media where every celebrity has a personal image retoucher.

Whereas the era of analog film based photography offered the world a window into seeing that was more powerful than the verbal testimony of an eye witness. It seems that the industrial age’s quest for knowledge has moved into the digital age where knowledge is no longer an external goal but an internal expression.

Perhaps the greatest risk generated by digital photography is that we ignore the plight of the real world, choosing instead to accept the fictionalized and imagined cgi graphic and thus abdicate our community responsibilities. Writing in Aperture, Geoffrey Batchen states, “it is not a coincidence that ‘hyper-photography’ has come into being in an age marked by volumes of information, where the dreams and hallucinations of television and Wall Street have enveloped society and become more real than the depletion of trees in the forest.”

Digital offers only simulation of the real without direct reference offers instead of knowledge only as Ritchin observes “conceit”. I think a strong case can be made for a renewed appreciation for photography’s simpler representation of the physical world through physical means. We can see the plight of journalism in the digital age, which has reduced its function to entertainment. We have returned to the world where the eyewitness account (oral testimony) is not acceptable and easily ignored. Massacres it is argued do not exist without photographic documentation. However in the digital realm where the stenographic qualities of the photograph are displaced as is time and space, there are no massacres, only a constant drama that “serves to sell untold billions of dollars of reassurance and diverting advertising.”

While photographs have always been manipulated, the difficulty it once took associated photography with a sense of believability that was supreme among all forms of representation. Whereas one might dispute the validity of photography, one must view all digital photographs with skepticism.

This is not to say that digital photography is not without its own merit. In fact that is the whole point of my argument. In this era of digital mashups, it is important to develop a greater level of media literacy that enables us to see and know the difference between the digital image and the traditional photograph so we might celebrate each for its distinct contributions.

Vicki Goldberg, in The New York Times, comments “perhaps photographers who manufacture ambiguous facts and fictions disguised as truths have got it exactly right; perhaps they are telling it the way it really is. Maybe photographs are not lying even when they skitter along the thin edge between real life and theater. Rather, they uncover the secret stories, mythic constructions and uncertainties that constitute our lives. We are in for some serious rethinking of photographic theories of representation, especially when it concerns the documentary tradition. The computer is an excellent tool to mitigate our limitations and to expand our expressive potential.”

William Mitchell, writing in The Reconfigured Eye, expresses his optimism: “a medium that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and that emphasizes process or performance rather than the finished art object will be seen by many as no bad thing. Protagonists of the institutions of journalism with their interest in being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for probable reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image – but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.”

And Ritchin further expresses this modern world by writing, “The alteration of the phenotype, modifying body parts and exchanging them among the people depicted is symptomatic of the transition from a focus on the visible world illuminated by the play of light and shadow, to experimenting with his coded being, or DNA. These media strategies begin to acknowledge the evolution of humanity from sentient being to social signifiers.”

Furthermore, digital photography is not restricted to the single image but can become a pathway or mosaic of meanings. Unlike the fixed syntagmatic structure of film and printed text, the digital image presented on the web becomes a non-linear exploration of meaning, with one pixel leading to the next. Ritchin describes websites such as the Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace which offer more complex paths to meaning than the metanarrative offered in a textbook.

Over the course of this semester we have realized an exit from the world of photographic document. We live in a world that can no longer point to authorship and original document, and therefore we will need to rewrite the copyright laws to address the digital reality of data versus tactile expression. Technology enables us all to manipulate the data through remixing. Stuart Hall showed us in the 60’s that natural function of culture is to re-contextualize or “recode” the objects of culture and to make it their own. Digital tools and the Internet make it possible to reconfigure any digital form of expression into our own.

To think of copyright protection we have to acknowledge the difference between the physical expression and the digital data. As I wrote in my midterm about copyright “Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. In this case the Supreme Court ruled that the collection of data in a phone book did not warrant copyright protection.
...In Feist, the Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow"
doctrine that provided copyright protection for databases and
compilation based upon the effort use to created the compilation.
Instead, the court decided that compilations and databases are
protected by copyright only when they are arranged and selected in an
original manner. Although the level of originality needed is not very
high, the white pages of a phone books are not protectable because the
selection of the data (all customers in a geographic area) and the
arrangement of the data (in alphabetical order) were not sufficiently
original as to come under the protection of the Copyright Act.

The internet, with its infinite mp3 and jpeg files is providing the cultural data that society uses to process their world into meaning. Pixels exists as letters of an alphabet. We cannot protect words, or their derivatives.

The biggest challenge we face with copyright law is our continued insistence on protecting derivative works. I think one has to acknowledge that all original thought is a derivative from a previous idea. Hollywood could not make a action film if someone enforced a copyright over Homer’s Odyssey.

The infinite malleability of digital image information precludes it from being protected in the same manner a photographic print could be protected in a previous era.I think a more reasonable approach would be to establish a litmus test that asks these two questions.

1. Are You Creating Something New or Just Copying?
2. Are You Competing With the Source You're Copying From?

If you are creating something new and you are not competing with the source you are copying from, then it should fall under fair use.


A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves. -Wynn Bullock

References:
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Mara Kurtz, "Seeing is No Longer Believing: Images in the Digital Age."
Fred Ritchin, After Photography
John Szarkowski, The Photographers Eye
Ben Tibbs, “This is not a plane crash”

How can copyright exist in the digital era?

"Believe it or Not?"
How can copyright exist in the digital era?

Remix, mash-up, Web 2.0, and user-generated content are all common forms of expression in contemporary society. The 21st century world is one where digital expression of information is becoming indistinguishable from the data it is expressing. “Digital Media translate everything into data, waiting for an author or an audience (or machine) to reconstitute it. Images can be output as music or music turned into text, or created by an algorithm, or transformed by an anonymnous and far flung chain of spectators.” (Ritchin, 2009) Audio sampling reveals the basic code of music and pixels converted into RGB numeric data reveal the information embedded in a photograph. Can we continue to try to protect music and photographs with copyright laws in this digital era? Who owns intellectual property in a virtual world? Recent court cases involving Shepherd Fairey and Jeff Coons are raising the issue of whether or not copyright laws that served to promote creativity in the 20th century may be stifling it in the 21st century.

In order to understand the issues in contention we need to look at what copyright is. Essentially copyright is a set of rights granted to the author of a creative work (book, photograph, film, music, play, etc) at the time of creation. Copyright gives the author control over their creation by giving them exclusive rights to: perform, display, reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works. The importance of copyright laws is that it establishes an intellectual property whose value can be used to provide incentive for further creative production and it protects the artist by establishing a certain amount of independence from the patron who does not have control over content unless it is explicitly transferred in writing. Copyright laws are complex because they are designed to also protect society’s ability maintain free speech. Embedded within copyright law are provisions for the "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research."

Artists and news media have a long history of reproducing copyrighted works legally under the principle of “fair use”. Art from the beginning of the 20th century began incorporating copyrighted works as part of a re-contextualizing of objects. Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades brought non-art objects into the world art as social commentary. Arthur Danto argued that Art had become Philosophy when Warhol elected to exhibit a box of Brillo pads in a museum. As art moved from modernistic ideals into postmodern philosophy, appropriation of copyrighted works became commonplace. Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” and large lithographs and screen-prints utilized cultural artifacts from newspapers and magazines to reframe social conversations. Andy Warhol is perhaps the most well known artist to appropriate imagery in his adaptations of photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Onasis. In the 20th century, appropriation art was restricted to either collage of physical objects such as a cut out of a newspaper article or photograph, or a transformation of image from one media to another such as Warhols transformation of black and white photographs into silk screens and Rauschenberg’s direct image transfers.

The use of copyrighted materials in the highly insulated and relatively obscure world of “high” art culture populated by museums and galleries is an altogether different world than the one we live in on the internet. While art has commonly made superstars out of its appropriation artists, the concept of limited editions has served to restrict the direct competition with the original artwork. News media has always been allowed to generate a profit while enjoying free speech privileges. Free speech has been protected but commercial exploitation is not. The Internet seems to have lost its academic roots and become an ocean of consumerism whereby everything is seen as a potential commodity to be exploited for profit.

By 1981 Rauschenberg had decided to abandon image appropriation due to a lawsuit brought against him for copyright infringement. It seems his financial success had made him a target for litigation because his art had become commodity due in part to its very mechanical nature that lends itself to mass reproduction. Warhol’s estate has also been subjected to paying out legal settlements. Art in the age of mass reproduction is no longer considered a unique expression that is transformative, but rather is deemed commodity with massive profit potential.

So how do we evaluate digital appropriation and digital collage? When a magazine hires a graphic artist to create an illustration for their magazine cover is it okay for the artist to appropriate multiple copyrighted images (the photograph no longer exists in the post film era) and claim authorship over this new compilation? Can the issues debated in the last century be arguments for these new variations? Let’s take a look at a hypothetical scenario.
You are an art director for The New York Times Magazine and have commissioned a photo illustration to accompany a short article about exercise equipment and the proliferation of home gyms.

The artist you have hired sends you a funny, collaged image showing a laundry room that now also serves as a gym. It contains an amusing visual mix of appliances and exercise equipment. We see underwear drying on the Nordic Track, a woman stretched across both washing machine and dryer doing pushups, stockings and bras hanging off a treadmill, etc.

When you ask the artist if there is anything to be concerned about in terms of copyright, he says "No problem. I simply found a great room in an old book of Wegman photographs, turned it on its side, then flopped it. I used Photoshop to eliminate all of the furniture and the dogs, changed the colors of the walls, put in a rug from a House Beautiful magazine editorial on beach houses, then created a large table by cloning a piece of the floor... I changed the view through the windows, added curtains (and changed their color) from a Pottery Barn catalog, and used a photograph of a cool girl doing sit-ups that I found on Facebook (I changed the length of her shorts and the color of her hair and made her taller). Finally, I scanned in some images of gym equipment that I found in an exercise magazine and borrowed a few kitchen appliances from ads in some of my mom's old copies of Good Housekeeping. I used Photoshop layers to add everything to the room image. When I got finished it was mine! Believe me, no one will ever know the difference, and anyway, its art."

This scenario is ripe for debate because it deals with the very issues of fair use, art, editorial content, derivative works, adaptation, and transformation. Let’s take a look at each of these. First of all let’s look at fair use issues. A magazine, a book, or a museum exhibition are generally considered editorial frameworks and offer a sort of safe haven from copyright issues. A photographer who photographs an image in a public space can exhibit their work in any of these venues without it being considered an infringement on the copyright of peoples’ likeness or property because we value the protection of the “publics need to know”. These graphical representations are generally restricted to the transmission or depictions of actual events or a compilation that provides for “parody, or criticism”. The simple duplication of an image is not sufficient to justify protection under fair use.

In the 2006 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals, the justices established current standards for the fair use of copyrighted images based upon the principle of “transformation”. The court stated Koons appropriation of Andrea Blanch’s photograph transformed it because it "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message."

But hold on a minute, should someone else be able to profit from the creation of a derivative work based in part upon my original work? Doesn’t this harm the incentive for working in the media arts? Collage or compilations can be copyrighted but they do not void the original copyright of the elements that are incorporated in the new work. The right to create derivative works rest solely with the original author unless the work is deemed sufficiently transformative to merit a free speech argument. In our scenario of the magazine illustration, I would have grave concerns over the designer’s attitude about their collage image. The responses from the designer seem to lack sufficient socially aware commentary. I am reminded of Paul Strands caution when photographing street people. He said “the (photographers) intent must be sufficiently humane to warrant the intrusion.

Although I can see legitimate arguments for seeing this collage as an infringement on multiple authors, the process utilized to transform the image along with the publishers editorial content attached with the image is sufficient in my mind to warrant a judgment that the collage is a transformation of the original into something new that is providing cultural criticism.

This transformational quality is at the very heart of user generated content and mashups. Society now has the tools of production necessary to download, reconstruct, and retransmit a totally new idea that is attached to original content. Fred Ritchin writes in his book After Photography , “Increasingly, much of the photographic process will occur after the shutter is released. The photograph becomes the initial research, an image draft, as vulnerable to modification as it has always been to recontextualization.” In text based literature we have allowed for the “quoting” of facts from original sources with appropriate attribution. It seems as if we are slow to recognize that a photograph and a song are literary texts worthy of “quotation” and reinterpretation. It is a natural human trait to take the parts and reconstruct them into new wholes. Stuart Hall showed us in the 60’s that natural function of culture is to re-contextualize or “recode” the objects of culture and to make it their own. We see this in oppressed subcultures. Symbols and signs take on new meanings. The Zoot Suit riots are an example of this from the Forties. Mexican Americans staked their claim through their protests of war rations on fabric to make a social statement about their 2nd class treatment by the dominant culture that expected them to serve in the army and fight to maintain the existing hegemony that was marginalizing them. They took the very symbol of white executive supremacy and recoded it into their own stylish symbol of pride.

The digital media world is transforming the whole issue of copyright. When a photograph can be seen as pixel data and sound referred to by its digital information, can the original expression remain unique? Is the publication of expression on the Internet making it “common-knowledge” to the point that it can no longer be protected under copyright laws? Is everything published on the web subject to celebrity status? Again we can look back at 20th century arguments such as the one in the case of Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. In this case the Supreme Court ruled that the collection of data in a phone book did not warrant copyright protection.

...In Feist, the Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" doctrine that provided copyright protection for databases and compilation based upon the effort use to created the compilation. Instead, the court decided that compilations and databases are protected by copyright only when they are arranged and selected in an original manner. Although the level of originality needed is not very high, the white pages of a phone books are not protectable because the selection of the data (all customers in a geographic area) and the arrangement of the data (in alphabetical order) were not sufficiently original as to come under the protection of the Copyright Act.

I think we are moving towards a world where Google can be seen as a modern version of a telephone book and the images, sounds, and text that are generated within its reference framework are the data that is freely reproducible under fair use doctrine based upon two significant questions:
1. Are You Creating Something New or Just Copying?
2. Are You Competing With the Source You're Copying From?

Of course these two questions require complex analysis that the text of a law cannot clearly define. We have a perpetual need for courts and lawyers to settle issues relative to the usage of appropriated imagery (data). But when you apply these fundamental questions to the scenario of the magazine photo illustration I think you can readily see that the compilation of these fragments of data is creating a whole new visual expression that is not in competition with the authors of the original image fragments. Again the 2006 Appeals court decision supporting the fair use of appropriated image clearly used these two questions in guiding their decision. Justice Sack wrote for the court:

"Koons asserts -- and Blanch does not deny -- that his purposes in using Blanch's image are sharply different from Blanch's goals in creating it" because Koons was using it as "fodder for his commentary on the social and aesthetic consequences of mass media."

The irony that is emerging in the courts and on the Internet is that corporations who are trying to strengthen copyright laws are actually encouraging consumers to violate it to some degree as long as they can retain all the profits. George Lucas has a website where he encourages users to generate their own star wars parody videos, but the terms of submission state that Lucas retains all copyright on the new works submission. Hollywood studios and advertising agencies now routinely offer consumers the opportunity to create their own commercials and trailers and offer the opportunity to publish these films. Corporations are actively participating within social networking sites. They see this as a powerful branding tool that binds consumers to their products, however when the profits decline they also routinely pull the plug. Michael Williams writes about this in his 2007 article “The Cult of the Mohicans: American Fans on the Electronic Frontier” published in the Journal of Popular Culture where he describes how fans are encouraged to develop fan sites to create a marketing buzz but then are sent cease and desist orders after the movies run in the theatres. Clearly there is a need to recognize the lack of competition with the original. When Warhol painted his cans of Campbell soup it was recognized that there was no threat to Campbell’s and they were likely the beneficiaries of the positive publicity. If we are to recognize that post-modern art embodies ideas over form and we recognize that copyright law does not protect ideas, then we can see a way towards transformation, both of culture and its laws that will guide us towards new heights of creative citizenship.



Sources:
“Editorial Use May Not Always Be Fair Use. “ (2006) www.photoattorney.com accessed online at: http://www.photoattorney.com/2006/01/editorial-use-may-not-always-be-fair.html

Ginsburg, V., & Throsby, D. (2006) “Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture: Volume 1.”Netherlands: Elsevier

Feist publications, INC. v. Rural Telephone Service Company. 499 U.S. 430. U.S. Sup. Ct. 1991.

Hamblett, M. (2006) “Artist Koons' 'Transformative' Use of Photo Affirmed by 2nd Circuit.” New York Law Journal October 31, 2006

Norman, G. (1995) “What’s new Pusenkoff?” accessed online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/whats-new-pusenkoff-1594011.html

Ritchin, F. (2009) “After Photography.” New York: W.W. Norton & Company

University of Washington (2006) “Copyright©Connection” accessed online at:
http://depts.washington.edu/uwcopy/Using_Copyright/Compilations,_Music,_Images/Compilations.php

“U.S. Copyright Office.” (2009) accessed online at: http://www.copyright.gov/

Research in Media Activism: A Summary of Learning

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows that it must out run the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It does not matter whether you are a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up you had better be running.” ~ Thomas Friedman

This is an apt description of what has occurred for me this semester. I began this term looking for ways to engage in media research that could lead towards activism in the area of community development. Many of the examples presented were related to a specific social issue with the intention of using media research to create a message that would activate change. The first example presented was around the issue of neuro diversity and Autism.

Unfortunately, I did not have a strong commitment to a single-issue cause, which would have made this class much simpler. Instead I pursued an interest in the role media itself plays in community development and found myself in the center of a maelstrom of activity in Spokane Washington where I have become a center stage protagonist of sorts.

Summary of Activities
In an effort to find a path I compiled 116 articles (of which I have narrowed my focus to the articles listed under works cited), conducted 14 interviews, helped stage and record a panel discussion about the changing local media climate, produced and recorded 7 community events that will be broadcast on our local public access television station, and co-founded a new media arts organization called F.A.V.E.S. (Film and Video Enthusiast of Spokane) and helped stage a short film festival at our community arts theatre The Magic Lantern. I also participated in a Career and Technical Education Spokane Area Advisory Committee Subcommittee for Photography and Video production that is working to create an internship program for high school and college students entering the film industry in Spokane.

The net result of this research will be a documentary film on the issues of community media and the state of journalism in Spokane that will be completed during the summer of 2009 and aired on our local public access channel. I have currently recorded over 6 hours of interviews and b-roll and have five more interviews scheduled in the next three weeks.

Research Questions
The initial inquiry I started with was the question “how does media effect community development in my city?”

Spokane Washington is a community with over 400,000 people in the metropolitan area with 31% of the population living below the federal poverty line. Historically Spokane’s economy was based upon manufacturing and natural resource jobs in farming, timber and mining and most of those jobs have disappeared due to automation, outsourcing, and global trade.

From Fall semester research I developed an understanding of community informatics, globalization, localism, as well as online virtual communities. Thus I started looking at media and it’s potential for local economic, social, and political change. Many researchers in the field of community informatics theorize that access to the internet and means of media content creation is supposed to mitigate the economic damage created by globalization and its hyper-concentration of sectors of business and industry. A significant barrier to communities like Spokane has been the level of media literacy and access to tools and training. Therefore my initial inquiry looked at whether or not Spokane has adequate access to media tools and training.


Article Review: The Effect of the Arts on Economic Development
My first step was to review academic articles that looked at the impact of media on a community. One of the first and most important articles I read was, “No Measure for Culture? Value in the New Economy” by Steven Bohm and Chris Land. This article provides an overview of the the historic trends in research and evaluation of the value of arts and media within a community. From this I learned of three primary measurements: Direct Economic, Social, and Workforce Development.

The arts have often been measured in terms of their economic impact direct and indirect due to the attraction arts provide for tourism and urban redevelopment. In Spokane the economic impact of a traveling broadway show is estimated to be in the millions. The construction of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and its affiliation with the Smithsonian has anchored a redevelopment of the Brownes Addition neighborhood in the core of Spokane, and the first tenants in the urban renewal of the west end of downtown were art galleries and performance theatres. In fact the neighborhood has been branded as the “Davenport Arts District” after the historic hotel renovation and its adjacent supporting arts businesses.

The second category of benefit is that of social participation and creativity that leads to innovation and increased human capital. The arts are seen as increasing livability within a community and as a stimulant for creativity and innovation within organizations where participants are employed. The paper sites organizations that encourage employees to participate in arts activities as a means of insuring their place within a competitive global industry. The artistic endeavors we do away from our work tasks, enhance and directly benefit our ability to work more creatively and efficiently which translates indirectly into economic benefit.

The third area of impact is related to the second. Arts training is viewed as an enhancement of employability. The skills necessary for producing modern art relate directly to job skills in the information age. Design skills and media production are seen as highly sought skills for employability and community support for arts training is being viewed as an important economic development strategy. In the past ten years Spokane has built a downtown intercollegiate college campus with Washington State University’s interdisciplinary design institute as one of its cornerstones. Local non profit organizations like TinCan provide free access to media tools and training for local teens with the idea that these resources will result in a future workforce that will stay in Spokane instead of migrating to larger cities.


Case Study: Public Access Television
I explored the development of a unique community initiative that was started by a local attorney Jim Sheehan, who took a multimillion dollar inheritance and invested it into the renovation of a historic downtown hotel which he renamed “The Community Building”. The community building is the first LEED Gold rated building that utilizes sustainable energy resources including being completely solar powered and utilizing a roof garden and water collection system. Mr. Sheehan proceeded to form a micro-community of tenants that represented the arts, media, environmental and social justice, and fair-trade commerce. Within his one block development exists a variety of media enterprises including a community low power fm radio station (KYRS) and a public access television station (CMTV) as well as coop art gallery and film theatre.


This led me to look at public access television and to begin a dialog with Jeff Anttilla the local P.A.T. station manager for a non-profit group Community Minded Television. During the course of interviewing Jeff Antilla at CMTV I found that there are multiple issues being addressed by this station. CMTV provides free access to video cameras and editing stations and offers low cost training courses. CMTV also produced public service announcements for local non profit organizations and has completed 67 of these in the past two years. CMTV’s broadcast signal reaches 100,000 homes in the region and gives local citizens the ability to broadcast content they create. Currently the station broadcasts slideshows of artist work for 12 hours a day and offers alternative programming the other twelve hours a day ranging from local documentaries, town hall type community forums, and presentations of local community events. They recently completed their first feature length documentary on the effects of mercury poisoning within the region’s rivers due to mining activities. This production was in partnership with an environmental group the Lands Council which is also a tenant of the community building.

According to Jeff, CMTV supports community development through the representation of diverse populations and organizations, through the free production of public service announcements that enable the non-profits to devote monies that would be spent on media production on their mission specific activities, and through workforce development accomplished by their media training. Jeff Anttilla says he has had several cases where volunteer producers and interns have gone one to work within the filmmaking and broadcasting industry as a direct result of their training and participation at CMTV.

A review of the Benton Foundation report on Community Media (Johnson 2007) summarizes the empowerment strategies being implemented at CMTV:

• Access to media tools and distribution to 100,000 households
• Alternative content production that looks at social issues overlooked by commercial media
• Media Literacy through staging of community forums on media
• Community Building through partnerships with other organizations and development of workforce skills through the training of volunteers and interns

“The illiterate of the future will be ignorant in the use of the camera as well as the pen.”
– Laslo Maholy Nagy

Case Study: Entertainment Media and Economic Development
Looking beyond social service documentary media and public access television I interviewed Juan Mas and Jeff Brightway who are independent freelance producers and directors who split time between Los Angeles and Spokane.

Juan Mas use to be a production manager for North by Northwest Productions which is a local film studio that does subcontract work for many Hollywood productions and produces direct to video feature length films. He recently finished a freelance job producing a 6 part miniseries for NBC.

I met Juan while serving on a regional advisory committee for local high schools that teach video and photography. Juan has stated that there is a need for more media training within the Spokane region and he is a strong advocate for community development based upon the positive economic impact that is created whenever there is a large film production occurring in Spokane. He stated that the two primary film studios in Spokane are operating below their capacity due to the fact there is not enough trained labor for the two companies to have multiple large projects at the same time. He is working to create an internship program for local high school and college students in collaboration with the screen actors guild and other union groups.

Jeff Mooring is an actor/producer and owner of Brightcast Media who relocated from Southern California. His company is in production on two local television series that will be aired on KQUP, which is a regional broadcast channel similar to WB or UPN, and is part of a small group of affiliates based out of Arkansas. Unable to compete with national broadcasters, KQUP has established a priority to produce local content and has contract with Mr. Mooring to produce two Spokane based shows. I first met Jeff while producing a recording of Winona LaDuke lecturing at Spokane Falls Community College. He wanted to meet with me to discuss hiring some of my video students. After subsequent meetings he has hired two students as freelancers to be paid at $25-50 per hour to start.

It is easy to see from these two interactions that there is potential economic growth to be had from locally produced media.

Case Study: A Media Arts Group is Born

One outcome of my conversations with Jeff Anttilla and Juan Mas has been the formation of a community arts organization which is be facilitated by CMTV, The Community Building, and The Magic Lantern Theatre. A planning committee met on March 13th and again on March 26th to outline some goals and action plans, including the agenda for the first few meetings. The first order of business was to consider what name we call ourselves. We listed out some buzzwords that reflect the values we are seeking to establish within the group. These words include: local, community, grass roots, enthusiasts, independent, film, & video.

A tentative name of F.A.V.E.S. has been proposed which stands for Film And Video Enthusiasts of Spokane. I have been elected chair of the organization.

In addition to the initial planning meetings F.A.V.E.S. will be establishing an online forum in support of local filmmaking. We have created a Google group for our membership which will host an event calendar as well as discussion boards for sharing of information. We also have a website at www.favesblog.com.

We held our first open membership meeting on April 28th and had approximately 90 people in attendance out of an initial email list of 400 community members.

The F.A.V.E.S. is looking to start out casually and has positioned itself as being a gathering of filmmaking enthusiast from amateur to professional with an opportunity to develop a series of education programs and opportunity for local producers to have their work screened as well as broadcasts on CMTV if they should want. At this point we are not seeking to establish dues or adopt a rigorous formal protocol. The primary mission of F.A.V.E.S. is to facilitate the growth in media production through social networking and educational opportunities each month. We see this as an opportunity to add to the local film and broadcasting mix with an emphasis on local grassroots enthusiasm that is in support of existing organizations such as the Spokane International Film Festival, Tin Can, local high school and college media programs and the other professional development organizations and educational groups.

During the initial meeting I shared remarks about Marshall McLuhan as well as Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Tipping Point - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” and proposed that what we were doing was supporting our community through the visualization of the imagined and the creation of self identity and the economic development that comes with media literacy and training. In a sense we are developing social capital for purposes improving the livability of our community.

In this process of developing a new organization I experienced reinforcement of Lazarsfeld and Katz’s personal influence theory and two step flow communication theory whereby I participated as an opinion leader as well as what Malcolm Gladwell would describe as a “connector”. While a film group may not change the world, a gathering of film makers may prove Herbert Marcuse correct in his assessment that "Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world."

Case Study: Johnson Garras Group
I met and interviewed Jeff Johnson and Chris Garras who are former media executives at local affiliate television stations. They have started a new media venture where they are creating software tools for online community development with the focus being on building relationships between for profit and non profit businesses. They have a goal of improving community through public private partnerships that they feel can be formed in a virtual community that is locally geographically based. They are part of a growing synergy of businesses that are interconnected in the East end of downtown Spokane. They have yet to launch their new site and have asked me to beta test it when it becomes available.

Case Study: Ethnic Media and Broadcasting
One reoccurring theme in my research was the potential for media to amplify message and build community within diverse groups that are under represented in mainstream media. I viewed the film “Stranger With A Camera” by Elizabeth Barret that tells the story of Canadian filmmaker, Hugh O’Connor, who was shot dead by Hobart Ison while filming a coal miner in Eastern Kentucky. The film asks the question of who has the right to tell the story? One of the positive outcomes of this event was the formation of the AppalShop media arts group that trained local filmmakers to document their region and culture. As a result of this I have placed a strong emphasis on trying to facilitate and train members of diverse groups to tell their own stories.

I have spent a significant portion of my time this semester researching and facilitating the production and distribution of ethnic media. One of my documentary video production students who is a member of the Spokane Indian tribe recently completed a short documentary on the impact of uranium mining on the Spokane Reservation. I believe it is the first film on the subject to tell the story from a tribal perspective. The net results of his effort have led to his film being shown at a local film festival, broadcast on our local public access television, the start of a native video production company, the story being carried on a regional tribal news channel, the start of a tribal news radio program co-hosted by my student, and more local media coverage awareness of water quality issues relative to mining activities on the reservation. Stories have been featured in the Spokesman Review and the Pacific Northwest Inlander as well as Out There Magazine.

In addition to this several students and I arranged to film and broadcast the first ever Intertribal Salish Language Conference that featured fluent speakers from seven regional tribes. I also chair the curriculum committee at Spokane Falls Community College that recently approved adding Salish Language courses to our language department.

In looking at the potential impact of media on culture I have interviewed and worked with native filmmakers who are using video and the Internet to seek to improve cultural ties and economic conditions. One young filmmaker is David Bluff who is a college student whose father is the Language and Culture director for the Kalispel Tribe. David has developed animated cartoon videos that share tribal stories in Salish for young people to learn their culture in their language. There are many initiatives being implemented to record elders speaking fluently and to use media as a means of sharing artifacts between the seven tribes. I have learned of many of the political issues that have severed and fragmented the tribes and their cultures and see the potential for ethnic media production combined with public access distribution as a means of empowerment.

While working on the FAVES group and the Quickies Film Festival, I met with Shonto Pete who was completing a feature length documentary at the editing studios of CMTV. Shonto Pete was arrested for auto theft and found not guilty in 2007. On the night of the incident he was pursued by an off duty police officer who shot him in the head after having been intoxicated at a local bar. The police officer was just found not guilty of assault in the 1st degree and agreed with Olson’s self defense claim and was give two years back pay. This court case was extremely controversy because the jury was not allowed to hear testimony that Pete had been found not guilty of attempted theft and that there was no physical evidence connecting him to the off duty officers pickup truck.

Having only read and viewed local broadcast media reports about Shonto Pete prior to meeting him, I realized afterwards how biased and limited the representation of Pete had been. A non tribal member would never know that Pete was married and a producer of music videos and documentaries on regional tribal pow wows. The image in the media suggested a completely different picture that is much more stereotypical.

This has strengthened my resolve to participate in ethnic media initiatives as a means of getting to better know my neighbors. I also facilitated the recording and subsequent broadcast of a lecture by Winona LaDuke who is working to bring native viewpoints on sustainable culture to non native people who possess the political power to make policy decisions.

Case Study: The Spokesman Review
Perhaps the net result of all of my interviews and research was the emergence of a crisis within media itself. Newspaper journalism is collapsing as a for profit advertising based industry. After participating in staging and recording a media panel discussion, and reviewing the 2009 Pew Excellence in Journalism Project (The State of the News Media 2009) I realized that my community is at a crossroads. One of Seattle’s newspapers has ceased publishing a print edition and 25% of newspaper journalist have been laid off. The past five years has seen the remaining local family owned newspaper shrink its newsroom in half. On the other hand interest in news media has never been higher and there has been a migration to Internet news sources that are mostly controlled through news aggregators such as google or yahoo.

Reader behavior has changed to where news is accessed multiple times a day on-demand instead of at regular intervals such as the 5pm news broadcast or the morning newspaper. Readers generally access material that shares a similar bias to their own and news content has generally been reduced to a reflection of media press releases with a significant reduction investigative reporting.

Just this past week Senator John Kerry convened a Senate committee hearing on the fate of Newspapers and the potential loss of the “Fourth Estate”. There may be a crisis brewing due to the loss of the watchdog function of media. While there are many that suppose citizen journalism can fill the void, the balance between citizen and professional journalism is yet to be realized and we are in the midst of uncertainty as it levels out.

The Pew Excellence in Journalism report outlines six key challenges for newspapers:

1. How to finance
2. Audience migration towards individual authors and away from institutions
3. Content accessed by popularity instead of importance: Loss of primary mission
4. Moving from a web model based upon drawing an audience to pushing content via social networking sites like Twitter, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc
5. Partnships with other legacy media such as radio and broadcast television. (The Spokesman Review has recently partnered with an AM radio station to provide updated news every half hour)
6. How to move towards on demand news that is continuously updated while maintaining quality.

After filming the Media Panel that explored these issues I decided to pursue followup interviews and have begun production on a documentary film that is putting a “Spokane Face” on the national issue of the state of journalism. It is my intent to open up a conversation between reader and publisher about the importance of Journalism to the democractic function of society, more specifically, my community which is a prototype mid sized city. This ultimately has become my single-issue research problem.

One of the interesting facets of my research has been how newspapers have overlooked the obvious and failed to adequately conduct audience research. One example of a newspaper using this strategy to buck the national trends is the Poconos Record

The Pocono Record sent out 13 people from the newsroom who did 200 interviews with readers of the newspaper. They talked to all these people and came up with a list of eight or nine subject areas that people had difficulty finding in their community. People weren't getting the kind of education information they wanted, they wanted more on infrustructure, golf, traffic, [and more]. So they figured out ways to beef up coverage of these things in the newspaper and changed some sections, which rolled over into the website, where they had more topic areas.

They did this in 2007 and by the end of the year, their print circulation was up, their web traffic was up 50% and their web revenues were up about 50%. What happened was that the website became known in the community as the place you would find out about everything, so they were able to raise their web ad rates. I think that could be repeated at every newspaper in America.

Sources: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/11/should-newspapers-become-online-ad-brokers-for-local-businesses325.html

In the course of my research for this film I have attended a lecture by Democracy Now host Amy Goodman and managed to speak with her directly as well as conducting on camera interviews with regional professors and media producers from all segments of media.

I am also in the process of conducting statistical research on the selection of media, interpretations of bias, and prioritization of local events in terms of coverage and desired coverage.

Conclusions:

• Some fundamental conclusions I have made based upon my participation this semester include:
• Journalism provides an important function for a democratic society
• Mainstream media does little to serve the local needs of a community and thus there is a need for vibrant and diverse community media outlets
• News is a two-way conversation that many traditional journalist are afraid to take part in.
• Media Literacy among print journalist is still limited.
• Media production and distribution plays a significant role in social, political, and economic development within communities
• Legacy Media and New Media work together. One does not replace the other.
• Media, irrespective to it’s content, is a conduit for culture creation and sustainability.
• Access to media is important for a sustainable community. Access has declined due to oligopoly corporate ownership that controls the majority of local media outlets and provides centrally produced content that doesn’t address local community needs
• Access to media is being threatened by government deregulation that is resulting in the closure of many public access television channels that are no longer funded by licensing requirements, and by the loss of newspapers due to declines in advertising revenue that cannot be made up through online advertising which is largely controlled by news aggregators such as Google and is extremely cheap to produce (26 cents per audience of 1000) and is migrating to a social networking platform that everyone has access to participate in directly without newspaper mediation.
• Paris Hilton is the most popular news search item on Google.
• There is a crisis among producers and readers of news and this is an issue that needs media activism.

Productions Spring Semester

1. Pete Metzelaar “Stories Among Us: A Holocaust Survivor”, Hagan Center for the Humanities, Spokane Community College
2. Winona LaDuke “White Earth Land Recovery Project” lecture, Spokane Falls Community College
3. Media Panel Discussion “The Changing Media Landscape in the Inland Empire, Get Lit Workshop at Aunties Bookstore Spokane, WA
4. Salish Language Conference, Spokane Falls Community College
5. Amy Goodman “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times.” Lecture, Gonzaga University
6. Armenian Genocide Rememberance Service and Lecture by Dr. James Waller, St. Gregorios Orthodox Church, Spokane, Washington
7. Get Lit Teen Poetry Slam, Empyrean Coffee House, Spokane, Washington
8. Personal Documentary Working Title “Crisis of Change: The Future of Media in Spokane” Interviews completed:
• John Caputo, Gonzaga University
• James McPherson, Whitworth University
• Ryan Pitts, Spokesman Review
• Jeff Anttilla, Community Minded Television
• Luke Baumgarten, Pacific Northwest Inlander
• Jeremy McGregor, Pacific Northwest Inlander
  

Sources:
Anttilla, Jeff. General Manager, Community Minded Television. In-person interview 30 April 2009

Baumgarten, Luke. Editor, Pacific Northwest Inlander Weekly. In-person interview 6 May 2009

Bluff, J. Director of Language Studies, Kalispel Tribe. In-person interview at the 1st Annual Intertribal Salish Language Conference, Spokane Washington. 24 April 2009.

Bohm, S., Land, C. (2009) “No Measure for Culture? Value in the New Economy.” Capital &Class 97 pp.75-99

Bradshaw, P. “A model for the 21st century newsroom.” Online Journalism Blog. 17 Sept. 2007. http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2007/09/17/a-model-for-the-21stcentury-
newsroom-pt1-the-news-diamond/


Bradshaw,P. “BASIC principles of online journalism.” Online Journalism Blog. 18 Sept. 2008.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/tag/basic-principles/

Caputo, John. Professor of Communication Studies, Director of the Northwest Alliance for Responsible Media, Gonzaga University. In-person interview 30 April 2009

Carlson, David. “The online timeline.” David Carlson’s Virtual World. 2007. 10 Dec. 2008.
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/1990s.shtml

“The Changing Media Landscape in the Inland Empire”. Panel Discussion with James McPherson, Whitworth University; Cheryl Ann Milsap, Spokane Metro Magazine; Ryan Pitts, Spokesman Review; Luke Baumgarten, Pacific Northwest Inlander Weekly; and John Orr, KYRS Community Radio. 11 April 2009

Cooper, A. (2008) “The Bigger Tent: Forget Who is a journalist; the important question is, What is journalism?” Columbia Journalism Review. Sept./Oct. 2008.
http://www.cjr.org/essay/the_bigger_tent_1.php?page=all

“Daily Internet Activities.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. 22 July 2008.
http://www.pewinternet.org/trends/Daily_Internet_Activities_7.22.08.htm

Ellsworth,E. (2008). “Extreme Media Studies”. Presentation to Understanding Media Studies Class on November 17th, 2008. New York: New School University.

Extreme Media Studies. (2008). Scans: Monitorial Citizenship.
http://www.extrememediastudies.org/extreme_media/3_monitorial/index.php

“Facing Spokane Poverty.” (2005) Spokane Regional Public Health District Report Update
http://www.srhd.org/documents/PublicHealthData/PovertyIndicators.pdf

FAVES. Film and Video Enthusiast of Spokane meeting 28 April 2009

Ferguson, Jeff. (2008) “Midnight Mine: The Legacy of Uranium Mining on the Spokane Reservation” Presented at the Quickies Film Festival, Magic Lantern Theatre Spokane 28 April 2009.

Ferguson, Jeff. Native Documentary Filmmaker and CoHost of “Intertribal Beats”, KYRS Spokane. In-person interview 24 April 2009

Feenberg, A., Bakardjieva,M. (2004). “Virtual Community: No ‘Killer Implication’ “. New Media & Society, 6:1, pp. 37-43

Friedman, T. (2005) “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century” New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Garras, Chris. & Johnson, Jeff. Owners, Johnson-Garras Group. In-person Interview 13 Mar. 2009

Gladwell, Malcolm (2008) “Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” USA: Little Brown & Company

Graham, Gary. Editor, Spokesman Review. In-person interview 7 May 2009.

Glaser, Mark. “Traditional journalism job cuts countered by digital additions.” MediaShift. 23 Aug. 2007.
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Why Photography Is So Important

Stuart Hall: Encoding/Decoding vs. Sender/Receiver Models for Communication

There are three basic systems of representation, reflective, intentional, and constructionist. The reflective approach (mimesis) seeks to find meaning in the objects, events, or people themselves. Truth and meaning are said to already exist within the world and language is used as a means of depiction of that truth rather than an interpretation. This approach is flawed because each individual relates differently to each experience they encounter.

The intentional approach to representation is the idea that the author of the expression creates truth or meaning. This is the idea that we use language to get across our intended meaning. This ‘sender-receiver’ theory supposes that proper use of language will communicate only what you intend to say and that you will be completely understood. While we do create messages with intent, the receiver is still limited to interpreting the message based upon their own particular experiential references, which makes it impossible for exact meaning to be shared.

The third approach to representation is the contructionist approach that recognizes the social interaction that takes place during the communication process. Meaning does not exist in objects themselves (reflection), nor in the individual (intentionality), but rather is formed through a system of communication that involves the translation of an idea into a system of codes that is expressed, received, interpreted and given feedback. Hall reshapes the send-receive theory into a model of encoding and decoding. Hall’s communication model rejects the textual determinism of the earlier sender-receiver model and gives both the encoder and decoder significant roles in forming contextual meaning.

Hall described the model of encoding/decoding in structural terms based upon the articulation of differentiated moments, production, circulation, distribution/consumption, and reproduction. The occurrence of one moment doesn’t necessarily guarantee the next and the communication isn’t complete until the encoded message is decoded and reproduced into social practice. We do not consume messages unless we alter or incorporate them into our social practices and there are many points at which interruptions or breaks can occur in the communication cycle.

Halls model stresses the socio-political relationship between encoder and decoder. The relative socio-political position of the encoder and decoder impact the identification of codes within a discourse. “The lack of fit between the codes has a great deal to do with the structural differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audiences, but it also has something to do with the asymmetry between the codes of “source” and “receiver” at the moment of transformation into and out of the discursive form.”

Raw historical events cannot be transmitted without first being converted into a story. Broadcasters of news must utilize linguistic codes (that are created by the culture in which they operate), thus the audience is also the source for these codes. The stigmatic encoding of the event for transmission via audio and visual discourse on television gives the message a privileged position and asserts a form of domination, or at the minimum a privileged position, in relation to the audience. When a television station broadcast a news story they encode the information from a particular viewpoint or ideology. The broadcaster is creating a preferred meaning. With television in particular, the Visual signifiers bear strong resemblance to the signified and are somewhat less subjective and therefore are more dangerous because they are more readily accepted as “natural” or “truthful”.

However the audience watching the newscast can decode the story using one of three strategies. The audience can decode the message “straight” and accept the “dominant” meaning by accepting the codes as they are presented (dominant-hegemonic position), or they can negotiate and accept part of the preferred meaning and modify some of the codes to add their own meaning, or they can oppose the message while understanding it’s intended connotative meaning.

The significance of Hall’s theory lies in the development of the framework of understanding that precedes the encoding and decoding of discourse based upon relative socio political positions within hegemonic structures. Hall points out that mass media broadcasters, while incorporating a relatively autonomous professional code, are operating within the umbrella of the hegemonic codes. What is refreshing about Hall’s work as compared to Adorno and Horkheimer, is the empowerment of the decoder through their negotiated or oppositional positions.

Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe [This is not a pipe.]

The differences of "global culture industry" to previous form of "popular culture" and "culture industry" according to Lash and Lury

The primary difference between Lash and Lury’s description of the “global culture industry” compared to Adorno and Hockheimer’s culture industry is one of determinism versus indeterminism. Products produced as commodities in A & H’s criticisms were valued based upon their identifiable uses. The value of a phone is only based upon its functionality. Emphasis was placed on production and circulation.

In the global economy cultural products are so ubiquitous that they no longer merely represent ideology and a battleground of resistance, they are mediating the “things” of everyday life that make up our lifestyle.

In Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry, production was limited to distinct products that were purchased and accumulated to support capitalism. Lash and Lury describe the transformation of global culture from commodities to brands. Culture is no longer contained within a single product but is cross licensed and transformed into every imaginable object of our everyday existence. Disney is perhaps the best example of this. A animated film becomes a sweatshirt, a video, a icon on a plate or cup, and part of packaging at McDonalds. Consumers are so inundated with cultural symbols that they have to find the means of normalizing it and have done so by absorbing these products with less ideological debate, and more as self identity. In a continuation of the Birmingham school of thought, these brands are consumed and transformed by the consumer to suit their personal identity. “When media become things, we enter a world of operationality, a world not of interpretation but of navigation. We do not read them so much as ‘do’ them (‘Just Do It’), or do with them”

As manufacturing has moved overseas through outsourcing, the American economy is based more on product design and brand identity. While all cell phones perform roughly the same function, products are marketed based upon a brand identity that is clearly differentiated from one brand to the next. The iPhone is defined by its corporate brand that is distinct from that of the blackberry. In extreme cases you will see the same exact product marketed under two different brands such as the Isuzu Rodeo SUV and the Honda Pilot.

The global culture industry is one of convergence as cultural objects descend from the superstructure and others ascend from the base. As mechanical reproduction and the expansion of media led to popular culture clashing with classical culture, the growth of vertical integration in global culture has smudged the lines further. Lash and Lury expand on Foucalt’s theories of bio-power and further expand the arguments against determinism as expressed by Althusser and Horkheimer. Brands are organic and carry with them memory. Consumers of cultural products int the global sense are no longer subjected to the mechano-power that determines form and function, the consumer “self-organizes” and modifies the objects to suit their own uses and identities. A cultural object now comes with “windows” and “doors” that permit further networking and connections. Lash and Lury use the example of the movie ‘The Matrix’ to illustrate that reality is in the mind, not the object, hence the global cultural industry is in the brand and not the commodity.