– Aperture Magazine It is quite a week for archaeological photography. [Link] [Link] The latest issue of Aperture [Spring 2004] has three photographers who work with remediated, digitally reworked imagery. Bringing together past and present with all sorts of tensions and layerings. Loretta Lux does spooky portraits, very mannered, in an old painterly style of…
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media and the archaeological witness
– photoshopic abuse in Iraq Sam has put me on to a Salon.com article – A picture is no longer worth a thousand words. “Which photograph of Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux and two boys in the desert is the real thing? No one knows for sure, in the age of Photoshop.” Salon journalist Farhad Manjoo…
tipping points
On trust and digital photography – Sam put it this way – and very effectively – Yes, but I think this is the central point of all this – that sometimes, a big enough quantitative change in the ease of doing something makes a qualitative impact on some social action. I think you see this…
prehistoric beads in South Africa
more on those items from Blombos Cave – a case for scepticism 75 000 year old shells claimed as beads – Blombos Cave, South Africa I was arguing a few days ago on 17 April [Link] that the case for these shells being evidence of a modern human mentality was fragile, to say the least,…
media archaeology – Prelinger’s story
Warren at Stockstock has pointed me to the great story of how Rick Prelinger came to start building his archive of ephemeral film – the unofficial, the everyday, the ignoble, the detritus, the humble [Link] Meantime also have a look at some of the movies made at last years Stockstock festival out of old media…
romantic pasts and archaeological crimes
There has been an increase in the theft of ancient artefacts from Dartmoor, a fabulous ancient landscape in the UK, reports the BBC. So the Dartmoor National Park Authority have started implanting electronic RFID tags in the stones themselves to mark and track stone crosses and troughs in their jurisdiction. This time though it is…