Ambivalence and Photography: Resistance or Exchange
in Edward Said’s After the Last Sky
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document in english
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school essay
published 21/08/2007
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level : Advanced
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SummaryIn his essay Picture Theory on the relationship between photograph and text, W.J.T. Mitchell refers to concepts he coins as the “rhetoric of resistance” and the “rhetoric of exchange and cooperation” (Mitchell, 41). The terms “rhetoric of resistance” and “rhetoric of exchange and cooperation” are perhaps best defined with Mitchell’s example of Walker Evans and James Agee’s photographic essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In their essay, resistance signifies for Evans and Agee the “sabotaging of an effective surveillance and propaganda apparatus, one which creates easily manipulable images and narratives to support political agendas” (Mitchell, 41). Evans and Agee are able to sabotage this untruthful—and thus unethical—apparatus of exchange of (and cooperation with) political agendas by way of resisting conventional forms of image/text juxtapositions in forming their essays. Conventional forms might include adding photograph cutlines in an attempt to place the shot in time and history, or using angle techniques to embolden the subject. By resisting these conventional forms, photograph and text do not exchange meanings and cooperate with each other vis-à-vis or perpetuate political aims. Instead, Evans and Agee’s photographic essay is a work in which the nature of the photographs is not a given; it demands objectivity from a viewer, a viewer who can draw his or her own conclusions from what is offered.
Table of Contents
- This essay will attempt to explore and decipher the essence of Mitchell's resistance/exchange concepts and their relevance in Edward Said and Jean Mohr's photographic essay
- When [our history] appears it is broken, often wayward and meandering in the extreme
- The rhetoric of resistance and of exchange in States then, applies to the reading and interpretation of the photo/text juxtapositions
- Perhaps, as Mitchell suggests, Said does not understand this rhetorical game of resistances and exchanges
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