Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:23 PM
sent by Karolina Karlic


Hi All,

First,
Renna, I do enjoy the idea of projecting stampedes during the end of the year. I have an idea in regards to the planes filming I would propose. Count me in!

Second,
Regarding the articles...I find myself arriving at the same end point. The idea of the Old West, what that meant for people and who it was meant for. I go back to our discussion on how land was occupied and considered cultivated, again by whom, where did peoples rights start to play into the history of the West. This brings me to the medium of photography. Photography has had an extended and probing relationship with issues surrounding human rights, migration, political violence and the plight of refugees. My interest lies in the community of children with birth right citizenship and the parents that go without political amongst other forms of representation.

I will reference an article by Anthony Downey, Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights.

"Photography as a medium, in all its immediacy, has the capacity to represent that reality-the vertiginous proximity of what it is to be a refugee, homeless, oppressed. Looking at this proposition, and the role of photography highlighting it, we need to turn to Hannah Arendt's, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) a book that addresses, among other things the quandary of the refugee and the subject who is without rights. Arendt's argument points out a profound justice, one that continues to haunt the discourse and application of human rights today: when an individual is deprived of nation-statehood and sociopolitical identity, the very rights that should protect him cannot do so. Human rights, then are the rights of a citizen, not a refugee, the homeless, the political prisoner, the migrant laborer, the dispossessed, the tortured, the silenced - all right-less individuals who are beyond recourse to the law redress before it."

I wonder if we can use this lens in looking at recent ideas of what the West has become, is changing into and if the land and it's properties have actually changed all that much at all.