We do not stand outside the world, looking out over this sea of poor benighted people, living under the shadow—or veil—of oppressive cultures; we are part of that world. Islamic movements themselves have arisen in a world shaped by the intense engagements of Western powers in Middle Eastern lives.
important to essayist, stylistically beautiful
It is deeply problematic to construct the Afghan woman as someone in need of saving. When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something.
important to essay
As some like Afsaneh Najmabadi are now arguing, not only is it wrong to see history simplistically in terms of a putative opposition between Islam and the West (as is happening in the United States now and has happened in parallel in the Muslim world), but it is also strategically dangerous to accept this cultural opposition between Islam and the West, between fundamentalism and feminism, because those many people within Muslim countries who are trying to find alternatives to present injustices, those who might want to refuse the divide and take from different histories andcultures, who do not accept that being feminist means being Western, will be under pressure to choose, just as we are: Are you with us or against us?
powerful statement, important to the essayist
However, I do not think that it would be as easy to mobilize so many of these American and European women if it were not a case of Muslim men oppressing Muslim women— women of cover for whom they can feel sorry and in relation to whom they can feel smugly superior
important to essayist
Finally, I need to make a crucial point about veiling. Not only are there many forms of covering, which themselves have different meanings in the communities in which they are used, but also veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency.
important to essayist
What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York's World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon, or how Afghanistan had come to be ruled by the Taliban, or what interests might have fueled U.S. and other interventions in the region over the past 25 years, or what the history of American support for conservative groups funded to undermine the Soviets might have been, or why the caves and bunkers out of which Bin Laden was to be smoked "dead or alive," as President Bush announced on television, were paid for and built by the CIA
convincing moment
Thus, in twentieth-century terms, photographs are records of things seen.
Photography can be a modern-day version of historical records, similarly to how in the past paintings of important events were created.
s we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption of our lives appears to be a hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen.
A jarring contrast of the sheltered lives we are living, next to the harsh reality for many people.
hose canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety.
Idea that without approval and/or acceptance from others, many people are scared to reveal their "poetry" in fear that it will be turned away or misunderstood. Approval=safety so free expression=freedom?
As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
As people are able to undergo the vulnerability of expressing their thoughts and fears, those feelings begin to have less of.a hold on them. "As we learn to bear the intimacy"
This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are -until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
Poetry helps give a name and description to the feelings that people already have. Things too hard to explain are described in a way that gives those feelings a voice.
Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction
The need to know, see, and understand everything. Nothing is as contained anymore, most things are reproduced one way or another because people cannot handle not knowing/having.
In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus—namely, its authenticity—is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.
You can reproduce a photograph, a painting, a film, etc. but you cannot reproduce that moment and place in time.
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.1
Interesting example. As household needs increase, new resources are made to make it as easy as possible to fulfill those needs, and the same applies to art form. We make it easier and easier for the viewer to consume, but it takes a huge effort to get to the necessary resources to evolve that far. "Appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand" shows that even though so much work was put into creating the movement, it's forgotten in the larger picture.
For the frst time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.
Shift from art made with the hands (in the sense of reproducing what's seen in front of them) to a mechanical art, which could capture the same scene at a significantly faster rate.
Good photography, regardless of its style, is always emotionally generous in this way. For this reason, it outlives the moment that occasions it. Weaker photography delivers a quick message -- sweetness, pathos, humor -- but fails to do more. But more is what we are.
Complex and insightful vs surface level.
images that masquerade as art but fully inhabit the vocabulary of advertising.
The "fantasy" that Cole mentioned earlier.
But there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images.
The idea that every photographer has an underlying purpose (whether that be economical gain, personal pleasure, etc.) and that purpose has the ability to represent or misrepresent a community.
The photographs in "India," all taken in the last 40 years, are popular in part because they evoke an earlier time in Indian history, as well as old ideas of what photographs of Indians should look like, what the accouterments of their lives should be: umbrellas, looms, sewing machines; not laptops, wireless printers, escalators.
The audience is given a perspective of India that satisfies what they expect it to be like instead of the current reality. 1st world countries and their ideas/expectations for what other countries should look like.