"Codes and Modes" Experience

            I attended the “Codes and Modes” panel on “The Weak Image: Documentary as Research.” When looking through the schedule, this concept stuck out as the most interesting. Perhaps I had high expectations, but it reminded me more of an elementary school presentation than creative professionals speaking on subjects that they are supposedly passionate about. I feel like I am being too harsh, but the fact of the matter is, I didn’t get much out of it. And that’s a shame since I genuinely wanted to love it. There isn’t anyone or anything particular at fault per say, but I felt embarrassed.

           When I heard  “Documentary as Research” I wasn’t quite positive on what that would entail. At a glance, it brought to mind a discussion from Media 101 regarding Eddie Adams’ photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong prisoner, one that people believe had helped speed up the end of the Vietnam War. A photo that ruined General Nguyen Ngoc Loan’s life when he returned to America because of the one sided story it told, showing him as an evil monster beyond repair. It proved just how powerful an image can be, and how skewed our thoughts become when they are not explained completely along side it.

           Irene Gustafson spoke first, and she seemed highly intelligent and I have no doubt she knew what she was talking about, but I made the mistake of sitting too close to the door, so people kept walking by me or chatted amongst each other heedlessly. So with that, my experience does not speak for the entire audience. She did mention Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories, which brought great insight into the subject matter. Gustafson used her example of how aesthetic judgment begins with the immediate feeling we may get when we see a photograph or the phrasing used to describe something, such examples were the adjectives “zany, cute, or interesting” and how they have a certain kind of connotation. The next person who came up was Charles Musser; he seemed a bit more upbeat about what he was going to present. He was also very hard to hear, and apparently made the error of depending on his PowerPoint/video during his speech. When the video he was going to play would not work, there was an awkward 10+ minutes in which a techie and Mr. Musser tried to fix the sound and PowerPoint before he gave up and read directly from his notes in a disgruntled and swift manner until he finished what one might presume as fast as he possibly could. I was confused and didn’t see the point they were trying to make. By the time Aparna Sharma stood up to present, it had almost been an hour and a half, which was the full time of the panel. Perhaps knowing this, she rushed through her speech that she read directly from her paper. 

           The concept of documentary as research brought to mind a cultural anthropology class I had taken, that brought up consequences that might occur when people are presented with only one side of a story. Consequently, one must be prudent when using documentary as research, as images create a stereotype at first glance.