"Manufactured Representation of the Real"

In this week's reading of Rowe's Framed and Mounted: Sport Through the Photographic Eye, there were several aspects that he covered in which I found to extremely intriguing. In the beginning, Rowe talked about the definition of still photography, as "a form of communication that relies on the notion of 'capture', frozen for all time is a gesture, an expression, incident or landscape." With this definition, it would seem to me that still photography is capturing a real life event that couldn't possibly be altered if it is history, but Rowe begs the question of whether or not those pictures could be actually "manufactured representation of the real."

He further explains this with providing the example of a man waving a stick at a policeman, which would make for a great picture in the realm of photojournalism, but Rowe says, what if the picture was really representing something else, such as the fact that maybe it wasn't even really all that dramatic because the man may have just been waving the photographer away, something that is very plausible. With photography, I suppose you can't really make an assumption of whether or not that picture was altered a certain way without actually being there. However, with that being said, I don't know if I necessarily agree with his statement "whatever the motives of the photographer, a framed, two-dimensional image can never be 'the thing itself'"because I don't think that applies for all cases within photography.

Another aspect of this article that I found to be thought provoking was the author's comparison of sports photography and pornography. He claims that they are similar in the sense that they are "both fixated in the body, minutely examining its performative possibilities and special qualities," as well as being "concerned with arousal."

Generally, I didn't want to believe that that statement had some truth behind it, in the sense that they are both designed to provoke some sort of sexual attention, and I even went so far as to think it's almost insulting to sports photography that it can even be comparable to pornography. I decided to do some research to prove that photography and pornography were really not the same thing, that maybe it was just Sports Illustrated's Swim Suit Edition that happened to be more provocative. But then I googled ESPN's online magazine, and on google the first link lead me to the normal ESPN page with you know, pretty PG - 13 stuff, and then right below it was a link to "ESPN's Body Issue." And of course, the first thing I see on the page is that image above, which completely and utterly destroyed any and all of my argument I was going to make. Which then leads me to my next question, why on earth are humans so incredibly fixated on the human body?


Source: http://espn.go.com/espn/bodyissue