"Annotative notes on Her/ Caring for the Image" in Can, Cannot, and other Options: Between Defiance and Desire, Towards Fuller Lives
Excerpt
Note to reader:
This notebook serves as a documentation of fragments and thoughts that aim towards a discussion on care and image-making. The author positions them as annotations in hopes of suggesting complexities of the image across history and positionalities. It addresses the Creative with an intent of offering ways of recognising how one mediates their gaze in the reproduction of the image. These notes also address the Audience, to suggest ways of thinking through complicity in the consumption of images. For both the creative as well as the wider audience are embroiled in the larger technological logic of image production and consumption: through the mechanical tool(s) of reproduction, capitalism, cultural imperialisms, and algorithms. The response through care requires different articulations and interventions, and at times, merely recognition through witnessing, as that is all that can be done. Her is the protagonist and subject in these notes and accounts, as it remains to question why history, theory, or language cannot be conceived from her experiences. Her voices from the margins, a line drawn by those of the privileged majority, and thus, at times, an experience that can only be understood by those cast behind those lines. I do not claim to write beyond my experiences and reflections as a Brown cis-woman, but also acknowledge that her, in manifestations across time and space, take on further intersectionalities. This notebook does not prescribe a list on how to care for the image. Instead, it offers considerations for the reader to reflect and decide on their own relationship(s) with the image.
Edited by Wayne WJ. Lim & Soh Kay Min
Published 2021
Link to purchase publication here.
Note to reader:
This notebook serves as a documentation of fragments and thoughts that aim towards a discussion on care and image-making. The author positions them as annotations in hopes of suggesting complexities of the image across history and positionalities. It addresses the Creative with an intent of offering ways of recognising how one mediates their gaze in the reproduction of the image. These notes also address the Audience, to suggest ways of thinking through complicity in the consumption of images. For both the creative as well as the wider audience are embroiled in the larger technological logic of image production and consumption: through the mechanical tool(s) of reproduction, capitalism, cultural imperialisms, and algorithms. The response through care requires different articulations and interventions, and at times, merely recognition through witnessing, as that is all that can be done. Her is the protagonist and subject in these notes and accounts, as it remains to question why history, theory, or language cannot be conceived from her experiences. Her voices from the margins, a line drawn by those of the privileged majority, and thus, at times, an experience that can only be understood by those cast behind those lines. I do not claim to write beyond my experiences and reflections as a Brown cis-woman, but also acknowledge that her, in manifestations across time and space, take on further intersectionalities. This notebook does not prescribe a list on how to care for the image. Instead, it offers considerations for the reader to reflect and decide on their own relationship(s) with the image.
Edited by Wayne WJ. Lim & Soh Kay Min
Published 2021
Link to purchase publication here.