Lunch with Jonathan Greenberg today – Stanford Law School. He specializes in conflict resolution and has a particular interest in national partition in the wake of the withdrawal of imperial powers and decolonisation – Korea, India, Palestine, Vietnam, and, of course, Iran and Iraq. He sees partition and the narratives and feelings it generates as…
posts
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…
archaeology and photography – splinters in the eye
Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography – The Book of Probes and Trek. Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution – abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in…
more archaeological remediation
– 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…
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…