You are Not Here

You are Not Here: Mapping Truth and Contrivance in Online War Photography

a collaborative effort by Erik Parr and Melissa Andrada


Most of us will never go to Darfur or Iraq. Today, much of our understanding of current political situations around the world are highly derived from the online imagery and news reports we see on the web. In the past, most people got their news from paper publications, but the Internet has taken over as the primary source of information. This shift in information-seeking behavior has not only changed the way we understand and act in response to genocide, war, and other political events, but also, influenced the way we think about the mediation of these events.
Information often takes the form of photography on the Internet. While photography has always been subjective and interpretative, the digitization and online circulation of photography have called greater attention to the politics that are involved with picture taking and looking. One rarely hears people say that, “the camera never lies”. People are beginning to realize that a photograph is always fiction; an image-based form of storytelling always reflective of a particular perspective. Since photographs are so blatantly malleable, people no longer put as much weight on the camera’s ability to accurately portray what they did not experience in person.
This project is a real-time artwork, gathering images of war and humanitarian crises, addressing theses issues of truth and contrivance in online photography. You are Not Here looks at the Internet and photography as mutually informing media that are always political. The mediation of such important media and information on the web always has a considerable effect on public perception and collective memory.
Despite the increasing awareness surrounding the contrivance of online war photography, many people fail to deconstruct and critique these images and their relationship to the Internet. While almost everyone is taught to read and write, most people are not taught how to read images and take them. Visual literacy is especially important since we live in an age where images carry more cultural currency than text and in many cases, an online photograph may be the only connection that the viewer has to an event.




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