Don’t call me warped! That hurts! It’s only my own photo I could play with, since my friends aren’t volunteering their faces.
This photoplay was prompted by a very good article, “Photoshop and Photography: When is it real?”, passed on to me by my dear friend Lena Rotenberg. Written by David Pogue in the New York Times (Feb 25), it deals splendidly with the choices that a photographer makes in creating an image of the world. The article links to images in a contest run by Popular Photography magazine, a contest whose winners in two categories submitted images that Pogue calls “Photoshop jobs”.
Pogue poses a question that could open a TOK discussion: “If you were running a photography contest, at what point would you draw the line and say ‘That’s not photography anymore?’” Using the Popular Photography contest as the focus would give students something to look at while they consider the question and a shared body of examples to point to as they give their responses. In TOK, such a discussion would immediately raise knowledge issues regarding definition and classification, and the challenge of technology to past understanding.
More significantly, any discussion guided toward the difficulties of making a clear distinction is likely to raise further TOK knowledge issues: “At what point would you draw the line and say ‘That’s not a record of reality anymore?’”
Pogue presents a list of choices that a photographer makes — from moving the camera to select the angle, to choosing the lens and depth of field, through enhancing with lighting, and on into the enhancement, then modification, of images on the computer. Any class of TOK students, though, is likely to be able to generate such a list in discussion. In class, I wouldn’t give students the article to read until they had explored the topic themselves and taken it further into the knowledge issues of the course.
In broad context of the TOK course, I’d link consideration of photographs with treatment of the selection, emphasis, and framing of representations of the world in language. As with language, we might see a photographic record as “biased” or subjectively “expressive” depending on context, and gain most when our students recognize that, as so many of us chorus, “the map is not the territory”.
If any talented TOK teacher or TOK students ever set that quotation from Alfred Korzybski to music, it could become a theme song for many a TOK course. If you ever take up this challenge, please do send me a copy of the audio clip!
Eileen Dombrowski
manipulated photo of me by me
Tags: David Pogue, knowledge issue, Knowledge Issues, manipulation, map is not the territory, photographs, Photography, reality, symbolic representation
There’s a great lesson here and a lot of thinking which can be done before presenting the article.
Yes, the map is not the territory, or as Magritte painted it (can’t insert picture) “ceci n’est pas une pipe”.
The idea of representation is such a uniquely human endeavour that the representation can overwhelm the thing represented.
That’s just it, Manjula. Right on! I shared a marriage-challenging moment in response to Lena, below, which is an example of your point. As I navigated while my husband drove, I was conceptualizing our progress down the road entirely in terms of the road schemes of the map and looking for the yellow road numbered 87. I missed the turn-off because I was expecting it to look as significant as it did on the map, and had separated my mental journey so much from the observable world around me that I wasn’t navigating with reference to rivers and mountains. I added two hours, ultimately, to the day’s drive. But my husband still loves me.
At times I wonder if that’s what happens to economists, navigating according to their theoretical models. This is the huge disadvantage of using only the coherence test for truth, checking only for consistency within a framework or body of statements. When you want to find the way, it’s better to turn to the correspondence test, and actually check with the world!
Thanks, Anita, for this expansion of my comments on symbolic representation.
That Magritte image, from a series he called “The Treachery of Images”, plays in quite a witty way with that relationship between the symbolic representation (image, word) and the physical object.
I don’t think we can post the image here without violating copyright in some form, but I found a link to it in an announcement of an exhibition from the Yale Library, in a December 2008 archived posting. http://www.library.yale.edu/librarynews/2008/12/
Anyone uncertain of what Anita Holt means can see the image there.
The self-referential humour can also move toward other TOK topics. When I saw a tee-shirt stamped with “Ceci n’est pas une tee-shirt”, I thought that I really must make one of those myself to wear to class to cope with mathematical proofs and certainty. In dealing with math in TOK, I would be entirely incapable of explaining Godel’s incompleteness theorem. I don’t speak numbers and don’t think in math. But once students get the idea of self-reference, they can get the idea of the move Godel pulled in creating mathematical self-reference…thereby creating a storm over the freedom from contradiction that mathematics is supposed to possess.
There’s a delightful meta-cleverness that Magritte and Godel seem to have in common.
Glad to have inspired this excellent posting! I love the link to classification, as well as to a quotation I’ve been mentioning quite often lately.
Two days ago my husband and I concretely experienced — again! — Alfred Korzybski’s quotation, attempting to find our way home when the map programmed into our 7-year-old GPS did not correspond to the actual road. The map was literally not the territory!
Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics also includes two other ideas I remember often: “The word is not the thing defined” and “The symbol is not the thing symbolized.” LOTS of TOK there!
Ah, yes…finding the way home…. I recall a moment where I ought to have held in mind that last Korzybski quotation that you mention, Lena. I was navigating and my husband was driving… I’ll skip the description, but the turning point was his asking, “But shouldn’t the mountains be west of us by now? We crossed the river half an hour ago.” I could answer only in terms of red lines, yellow lines, and numbers. A marriage-challenging moment!