Talk: David Levi Strauss with Duncan Wooldridge (online) The Photographer’s gallery. 7.12.20 (zoom)

I attended this zoom event before I knew that I would be reading his new book as research for my assignment 5. At the first time of reading I found it challenging and did not complete my reflection, knowing that I would have to return to it to understand it.

A few months on with more background reading, I find that I can read his book now with a better understanding, perhaps I just needed a purpose! I have now revisited the recording of the talk, made notes and reflected.

The event: David Levi Strauss was in conversation with photographer, writer and curator Duncan Wooldridge examining belief in the image.

My notes:

In his new book Photography and Belief Levi Strauss writes:

“Visual images become more like testimony than like perception… If we do not find a way to believe what we see in images, we lose the ability to act socially.”

This book came out of an essay that he wrote Co-illusion: Dispatches from the end of communication (2020), which was the precursor to this book, and a response to the Trump phenomenon. Levi Strauss describes it as essays on the present and how we believe and allow ourselves to be manipulated by them. He explains that being part of a process that has been going on for a long time, we tend not to question images: 

• Belief is a commitment, the beginning of a process of manipulation
• We are manipulated by images as we think of images as self-evident so we don’t question them or our belief in them.
• Belief is social, as it is dependent on belief by a large part of society – a common belief
• It is empowering if you read images knowing the discourse behind them
• When he talks of “magic” he is describing the agency created by our technological devices.

Levi Strauss talked of Flusser who wrote Towards a Philosophy of Photography in 1983 that introduced theories about changes in our communication environment. Fusser is concerned that these “apparatuses” will reduce freedom and points to experimental photographers who he says play against the camera.

Much of the interview discussed his book co-illusion (Strauss, 2020) in which he describes how he adopts languages of power to reveal how they speak to the image. Here he Looks at the changes in our communications environment and how that allowed the political dangers that he talks about in the USA, as critical views have been reduced and even how political events can now be set up for the camera. Levi- Strauss call this closing down of questioning very dangerous.

An idea that came out in the Q&A session was on image production and dissemination: Does the photographer need to announce their active part in the work before an image can be read? To which Levi Stauss agreed as he did to the suggestion that ultimately it is the way that the viewer acts that’s important.

Even the second time of viewing I find the talk material challenging, so I will return to his book Photography and Belief to increase my understanding of his ideas.

See my post: https://nkssite5.photo.blog/category/research/a5-research/a5-additional-research/levi-strauss/

References:

Strauss, D. L. (2020) Photography and Belief. David Zwirner Books.

Bajusz, O. (2020) ‘Co-illusion: Dispatches from the end of communication’ In: Visual Studies pp.1–2.

Next Post: https://nkssite5.photo.blog/2021/04/09/research-assignment-five-contextual-research/