Monday, August 29, 2016

Trevor Paglen's "One Hundred Pictures, Frozen in Time" & Errol Morris's "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" - Response

Starting off with Trevor Paglen's One Hundred Pictures, Frozen in Time, Paglen states about a discovery of cave paintings in the Lascaux cave in France during the 1940's, and presents his fascination of what's depicted in the paintings themselves. Whenever he look at the paintings, he goes back and forth on what's being depicted in them; he thinks it could be about a hunt, a ritual, relationship between human and nature, a murder confession, or a visual joke. There was a point Paglen though it might be an artwork made to be shown to those in the far future, to showcase what happen in the artist's timeline (or to think how early humanity would work in the future). Inspired by this concept, Paglen began a project called The Last Pictures, which is having communication satellites to be like "time capsule" filled with picture of his choice; the "time capsules" would then be left for those in the further future to look at the pictures - as if they were "cave paintings" (in context) - and have them learn about what happened to our Earth many years ago.

In Errol Morris's Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire, Morris provides his thoughts on how pictures are important, but can be meaningless if they don't have captions for them (even for old pictures). To be more specific, he states that one would be clueless of what are truly (going on) in the pictures, but one can guess on what/who they are; captions help broaden on what are in the pictures, but one would question if they're true. For example, in the article, there's an old picture of a ship, but by looking at it you can't tell what ship it is. With the caption stating that the ship is the "Lusitania", people will think the ship IS the "Lusitania", but other would think it's something else. The thing is, based on Morris' insight on his topic, context is needed for pictures to better understand what are in the pictures themselves; although, he does state that pictures can never have a "true" or "false" to them.

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