The Role of Photography in Construction of Alterity

The Role of Photography in Construction of Alterity

by | 29 May 2008 | Art History

Beirut, Lebanon, Nightclub by Stephanie Sinclair, 2005Nightclub in Beirut, Lebanon (Stephanie Sinclair, 2005)

In July of 2006, during a bout of intense border battles between Israeli armed forces and members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, a photograph made by Stephanie Sinclair achieved a broad second life on the Internet when it accompanied a post on food writer and Travel Channel star Anthony Bourdain’s blog; Bourdain and crew had been filming an episode of No Reservations in Beirut and were “trapped” in the city owing to the destruction of the airport and an naval blockade effectively halting departures by Americans from the Gulf states. The photograph had originally appeared on March 12, 2005, in the Travel section of the New York Times with a story by Scott Spencer about the nonchalant nightlife scene in Beirut following the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The image was described in the Times as “Love among the ruins at the war-themed Beirut club known as 1975,” and on Bourdain’s blog with the following caption: “Prewar partygoers enjoy the music and atmosphere at 1975, a bar whose theme is the country’s civil war.”

The odd syntax of the cutlines suggests that “the war” was an omnipresent future, past, and present entity. Regardless of the date the image was made, though, its placement in the context of stories about a “live,” ongoing military flare-up, even amid the larger ceaseless tragedy in the Middle East, makes the powerful suggestion that Beirutis party even as rockets and air strikes devastate the buildings around them.
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Contextualist Approaches to Photography/The Photograph as Cultural Construction (Deconstructive Discourse)

by | 16 Mar 2008 | Art History

 

“…One of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence.”
In her essay “The Imaginary Orient,” Linda Nochlin certainly discusses the omnipresent absence of Westerners in the works of two painters in particular, Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Nochlin seems to focus on how Delacroix, the unapologetic romantic, and Gérôme, known as a “realist” painter, created a vision of “the Orient” (actually the near Middle East) that elevated the omniscient Western observer to superior connoisseur while relegating Turks and Arabs to the roles of sexual and social degenerates dwelling in decrepitude who can only benefit from colonial oversight. However the feminist art scholar who asked “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” eventually reveals her true interest in Orientalism, that of revealing these French painters as renderers of women as possessions and completely powerless victims.
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