WangN+Week+12

=Week 12 4/16/2012: Reflection on VSP=

As I reflect upon my work on my Visual Story project to date, I can’t help but wonder if I’m doing it correctly. I believe I have translated what I have envisioned to Prezi in as accurate a form as I can get, but I feel as though I am lacking in the application of the class readings. I know they are there, but I have not yet thought enough about them to apply them to this project. I will start that now.

Previously in my weekly assignments on Wikispaces, I have mentioned my fascination with human conflict—namely war—and its influence or impact upon the individual. Jarell’s poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” is short, but packs a political charge that I wanted to avoid. Yes, the element of politics is important when one considers war and human conflict, but it is a vast subject that can sweep the original topic under its great weight. Instead of focusing upon the nameless members of “the State,” I wanted to focus on the ball turret gunner instead—a boy who woke up in the middle of a battlefield.

Photographs may, by themselves, be greatly moving, but this is based entirely on context. If I open up a newspaper and see a poignant image of a man on fire and see the text describing the conflict in Tibet to me, I know what to be upset about. Since my visual story project is based entirely on “arbitrary” images found through Google search with words like “abandoned teddy bear” and “black cloud monster,” putting the photographs next to each other is what conveys the meaning in an appropriate manner. This is an example of Ramage’s interpretive relationships. The meaning conveyed to the viewer is dependent entirely upon the context upon which the medium is viewed.

War images are usually “leveled” by the camera, according to Sontag. The meanings are flattened by successive clicks of the camera—a voyeuristic method of recording the world. When Sontag says that “photographing is essential an act of non-intervention,” it reminds me of the images I have seen of people at war, and the atrocities committed. The lens of the camera is almost like the great eye of the world, through which people see things happening, and do nothing to stop it. Instead, the choice is merely to observe, to capture. In the same way the camera captures images of murder, Jarell’s poem captures the image of the ball turret gunner who finds himself in the belly of a fighter plane in a similar matter in that he was in the belly of his mother; who awakens from the fantasy of his life in the middle of a firestorm, and is the remains of his body is casually washed out to prepare for the next shooter. In other words, life is a dream, filled with mundane everydayness that is wiped away when a human is placed in a place of conflict--like war. That is when a person truly "wakes up" to face the honest reality and fragility of life.