OUGD501 - Lecture Notes: Ethics - What is Good?

We live in a fundamentally unfair, capitalist system. It is based on exploitation and inequality. And as such, how can we exist within an unfair system and say that we are good, ethical people.

First Things First
1964 manifesto by Ken Garland. Celebration of designers, and a sigh at the exploitation of creative talent in a capitalist society. Says its unethical to waste talent for pointless things for the benefit of capitalist people.

First Things First 2000
Re-released by adbusters magazine, which is an anti-capitalist magazine. They republished and revised the manifesto, and the tone changes to not just be a cry about wasting talent and doing something for a social cause, it gets more venomous and targets advertising. 

The differences are really important between the two, and in the second one:
They pick out advertising to be the worst thing
Accusing designers of being part of a system that creates meaningless products so people buy things they don't need
Says that designers are uncomfortable with this and don't want to be a part of it anymore
Saying by producing any work which is consumerist is really bad and unethical as it is ruining the world, and should be opposing capitalism
Should use visual skills to say how bad consumerism is
In the second manifesto really famous and rich designers signed it, and it's really easy to turn their nose down at people 'with no ethics' because they don't have money or buying a house to worry about, as a lot of designers don't have the luxury of choosing who they work for and need money to live in the world

Victor Papanek
A really interesting writer, who although isn't an academic write a lot of books

'Most things are designed not for the needs of the people but for the needs of manufacturers to sell to people' (Papanek, 1983:46)
He sees a bigger purpose for creative people, and wants them to use their skills for more important things in the world. 

He designed a radio receiver for third world countries, made out of things you can find in third world country streets like a tin can and cow dung. It is 9 cents to make, and is made not for profit and for the greater good, and is therefore ethical.

How do we determine what is good?

Subjective Relativism

• There are no universal moreal norms of right and wrong
• All persons decide right and wrong for themselves

People just say 'I think it's alright, so I'll just do it' and no one can tell them otherwise

Cultural Relativism

• The ethical theorry that whats right or wrong depends on place and/or time

Figure out what context, culture etc you're in and decide whats good/bad based on that. 

Divine Command Theory

• Good actions are aligned with the will of God
• Bad actions are contrary to the will of God
• The holy book will help make decisions

Based on Dogma, based on given a set of rules and following them, isn't based on reason

Kantianism

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) a german philosopher 

Peoples wills should be based on moral views

Therefore it's important that our actions are based on appropriate moral rules

We sit back and rationalise and think things through. 

He was one of the first to try and formulate how to make decisions.

Created a set of rules to help determine whats right called Categorical Imperatives

Two formulations of the categorical imperative

Act only from moral rules that you can at the same time universalise 

• If you act on a moral rule that would cause problems if everyone followed it, then your actions are not moral. It isn't out of emotion, it is out of logic. If you can justify that if everyone followed your suit and wouldn't cause problems, it would be ethical
• For example, if someone said I will never give to charity, and everyone followed suit, there would be no concept of charity and this is needed, therefore it would be unethical to say this.

Act so that you always treat both yourself and other people as ends in themselves, and never only as a means to an end

• You should not use, lie to or deceive other people, and if you use other people for your own benefit that is not moral.
• It can be argued that the second manifesto is unethical based on this second imperative  

Utilitarianism 

Principles of Utility

• An action is right to the extent that it increases the total happiness of the affected parties
• An action is wrong to the extent that it decreases the total happiness of the affected people
• Happiness may have many definitions such as: advantage, benefit, good or pleasure

Rules are based on the Principle of Utility

• A rule is right to the extent that it increases the total happiness of the affected parties
• The Greatest Happiness Principle is applied to the moral rules

Similar to Kantianism - both pertain to rules

This is flawed, as sometimes you can do a good deed but the consequences are bad, so it's not a perfect way of forming ethical views.

Social Contract Theory

• Thomas Hobbes (1603-1679) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• An agreement between individual held together by common interest
• Avoids society degenerating into the state of nature or the war of all against all
• Morality consists in the set of rules, governing how people are to treat one another, that rational people will agree to accept, for their mutual benefit, on the condition that other will follow those rules as well

If everyone did whatever they want, what you are left with is something akin to the state of nature, where everyone is competing or screwing each other, and in society you need something like a social contract where we all agree for the common good we have laws and regulations, and some things that are prohibited to do for the stability of the world. To be ethical is to do something for the common good, rather than individual gain.

Criteria for a workable ethical theory?

• Moral decisions and rules
• Based on logical reasoning
• Come from facts and commonly held or shared values
• Culturally neutral
• Treat people equallity

Statistics 

The assets of the worlds top three billionaires are greater than those of the poorest 600 million on the planet

More than a third of the worlds population live on less than two dollars a day

1.2 billion live on less than one dollar a day

Per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa = $490

Per capita subsidy for European cows = $913

OUGD501 - Lecture Notes: Cities and Film

This lecture looks at:

• City in modernism
• Beginnings of an urban sociology
• City as a public and private space
• City in postmodernism
• Relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

He is a German sociologist and he wrote Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903

It is an important essay 

Dresden Exhibition 1903

Simmel is asked to lecture on the role intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual.

Public, employment, traffic, fine art etc were issues discussed

This was at a time that Freud was writing his lectures on analysis

Urban Sociology

The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism. 

Louis Sullivan

He was an architect, and created the modern skyscraper. He mentored Frank Lloyd Wright. He coined the phrase 'form follows function' in an article about architecture. This phrase sums up what modernism is about, as it should be functional rather than decorative.

There is an organised design to the Guaranty building that he designed.

Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity. Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings.

Charles Scheeler

Fordism

Industry in Detroit

Fordism: mechanised labour relations

Antonio Gramsci essay 1934

In the essay Americanism and Fordism he looks at the production line, where human bodies are used to create maximum productivity with minimal effort and create mechanical movements. 

Modern Times, film by Charlie Chaplain

It's a critique of the idea of the production line. Character suffers a mental breakdown because he isn't good at the job

Stock market 1929

Crash

Factories closing, unemployment goes up

Margaret Bourke-White:

Flaneur

The term comes form the French word for stroller, lounger, loafer. Means 'to stroll'. A bourjois literay figure from the 19th century. Someone who walks around the city and experiences the city from a removed point of view, not a worker. He's not part of the mechanism and how the city works. Part of his role is to record what he says, whether in an artistic or literary way. French poet Charlies Baudelaire says 'He's a person who walks the city in order to experience it'

Walter Benjamin

Adpots the concept of the urban observer as an analytical and theoretical tool and as a lifestyle seen in his writings. The architecture arcades present an uninterrupted view of the city, which is protected from the weather and is an ideal place for the flaneur to walk about.

Photographer as a flaneur

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker connoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque' p55 Susan Sontag On Photography

Flaneuse

Susan Buck-Morss says the only type of women on the street is a prostitute or a bag lady

Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne 1980

Stalks this guy in Venice and takes photos of him without his knowledge, exploring female on male stalking in the city

The Detective 1980

She pays someone to follow her and take photographs of her existance, and she takes photographs of him as well. His photos and notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes about him. Set in Paris

Here is New York Book/exhibition

Weegee

He had a darkroom in his van, and got to scenes before even the police had as he had a police radio in his van

Reported so many murders and crime scenes

Got there before any other photographers

The Naked City

It is a book of Weegee's photos, then a film was made about it. 

Lorca di Corcia Heads

Sets up lights in the pavement so when people walk past it catches them and he takes photographs, so they almost look like film stills as they appear constructed. He did it in a lot of cities. 

Walker Evans Many are Called

He has a camera under his coat on the subway, he takes photos of people who are unaware of being photographed. 

Ed Soja The Postmodern City

John Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street NY 1976

OUGD501 - Lecture: The Gaze and the Media

'men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at'. - Berger

Hans Memling - Vanity

He painted this painting to give him pleasure. He blames the woman for him looking at her because she is holding a mirror.

Alexandre Cabanel - Birth of Venus 1863

Woman has hand held over her eyes, looks like shes just waking or going to sleep. We're invited by the artist to gaze at the woman. 

Sophie Dahl - Opium

Photographer uses reclining pose, and it controversial when it was released as it was too sexual. 

So they turned the image around to the side when it was realeased.

Titian's Venus of Urbino, 1538

The look in woman's face is flirty and an invitation for us to look at her body.

The position of her hand is covering her vagina but can also be seen as a sexual pose.

Manet - Olympia - 1863

A more modern nude compared to the last one and there are slight differences. There's a difference in the woman's gaze, she directly addresses us. Her hand position is a more definite position over her privates stopping us from looking.

Guerilla Girls

They created this advert which went on buses.

Jeff Wall - Picture for Women 1979

She has a vacant, inactive look. In the center of the image there is a camera, and Wall is separated from the female in the far right of the image. 

Coward, R. (1984)

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets

Woman is prevented from returning our gaze with sunglasses on, even though she is looking at the camera.

Eva Herzigova, 1994

No return of the gaze as she isn't looking at is but we can look at her body. It is iconic beacause it stopped traffic.

The problem with voyeurism on this scale is that it prevents women being seen as real people, and it objectifies women. 

'The profusion of images which characterises contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women.. a form of voyeurism' - Coward, R.

It's not just objectification of women, it happens to men as well.

Can men be objectified as women can? If so, what frequency of objectivity is in these ads.

It is not on the same scale as women at all.

Marilyn: William Travillas dress from the Seven Year Itch 1955

Theatres and cinemas are dark rooms, where the images are supposed to seduce as and can't return our gaze, and we can look without being seen.

Active male role

Passive female role

Artemisia Gentileschi

Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1620

Pollock, G 1981

Women marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history

This marginalisation supports the hegemony

Tracey Emin Money Photo 2001

Her work couldn't be work or genuine because she was making so much money of it.

Caroline Lucas MP 

Campaigns for no more page 3. It can be left around anywhere for anyone to see. The Sun itself is available in parliamentary houses 'it does strike me as a certain irony that it is inappropriate to be wearing this t shirt in parliament.'

Criado-Perez argued that as the Equality Act 2010 commits public institutions to end discrimination. She received up to 50 threats a day via Twitter including threats of rape and death. Although she reported the abuse police lost evidence and she was forced to delete her account.

She wanted to make sure the female figure on the five pounds note is replaced with another female figure, rather than a male, as there is lots of positive images of women being removed.

Lucy-Ann Holmes founded a campaign to end page 3 and received death threats too.

'I'd say its a constant undercurrent, when women write about feminist issues or are exposed in a lot of media for speaking out about sexism they tend to get a barrage or abuse and threats' she said.

When Murray won Wimbledon newspapers said no one had won for 77 years, but in actual fact a woman won 30 years ago which is ignored completely. 

Susan Sontag 1979 on photography

To photograph something is to appropriate the thing photographed

You own it and can carry it around and have possession of it

The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tactily, often explicity 

Reality Televison

Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye - the power of the gaze

Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality

Editing means that there is no reality

Contestants are aware of their representation (either at TV professionals of as people who have watched the show)

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of just 'looking'. - Victor Burgin

OUGD401 - The Photograph As Document

The lecture is going to look at

• a short history of documentary photography
• images of the working class/poverty
• reporting and war
• photographing other cultures
• the concept of the decisive moment
• the constructed document, then and now

William Edward Kilburn The Great Chartist Meeting At The Common' 1948

The chartists were an early union movement, and this photograph is protesting about conditions in factories. Recording an important event, the camera is a witness for us.

Grahame Clarke

In many contexts the notion of a literal and objective record of history is a limited illusion. It ignores the entire culture and social background against which the image was taken, just as it renders the photographer neutral, passive and invisible recorder of the scene.

'How The Other Half Live' - Jacob Riis, 1890

He records slums in New York, wrote and photographed about the conditions, as a push for social reform

Jacob Riis Bandit's Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street 1888

Jacob Riis A Growler Gang in Session (Robbing a Lush), 1887

He got the children to reenact this scene, it is purely constructed, but he said that it was reak. 

Lewis Hine, Russian Steel Workers, Homestead, Pa., 1908

Hine has a different photographic style, he gives them more of a dignified look, like this image is a portrait, whereas Riis observed from a far and referred to them in derogatory forms.

Lewis Hine, Duffer Boy, 1909

Margeret Bourke-White, Sharecroppers Home, 1937

Her images were put in LIFE magazine

Russel Lee, Interior Of A Black Farmers House, 1939

FSA photgraphers documented the conditions in America during poverty and the dustbowl.

Bill Brandt, Northumberland Miner at His Evening Meal, 1937

He documents lots of objects in the image as well as the people eating

Robert Franks exploration of Americans, Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1958

William Klein is known for his use of blur and grain in images. Rather than having a voyeuristic take on images, it is like he is actually part of the group he is photographing

William Klein, Dance in Brooklyn, 1955

Magnum Group

• Founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Ethos of documenting the world and its social problems
• Internationalism and mobility

Cartier-Bresson coined the term 'decisive moment'

'photography achieves its highest distinction - reflecting the universality of the human condition in a never-to-be-retrieved fraction of a second'

Documentary and War

Robert Capa, The Falling Soldier, 1936

Originally said it was the moment the soldier was captured just before his death

But it has been disputed since, and it has been said it was taken somewhere were there was no fighting, and it was at a different time. 

Robert Capa, Normandy, France, 1945

George Rodger, Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

Retains a respectable distance to the dead

Lee Miller, Buchenwald, 1945

Shows survivors with a sense of respect and distance

Hung Cong Ut, Accidental Napalm Attack, 1972

Shows real effects of so called accident, and is seen as an anti war image

Very iconic

Robert Haeberle, People About To Be Shot, 1969

The photographer witnesses the shooting and before the people are shot he shouts 'hold it', so that he can get the image. 

Don McCullin, Shell Shocked Soldier, 1968

Documentary Exhausted

Grahame Clake - To speak of documentary photography (at this point in its history) is to run headlong into a morass of contradiction, confusion, and ambigioty, a position made more problematic by the way in which the increasing sophistication...

Edward Curtis, Native North Americans, early 20th century

Sepia tone and soft focus romanticises the end of the native americans

He is a wealthy man who has money to travel, and makes this big document, as a way of documenting his travels, but it has a cliche presentation of what is thought of the native americans in that time

Rodger, Korango Nuba Tribesman, Victor of a Wrestling Contest, 1949

Less of an artistic statement, taken during the wrestling match

Jeremy Deller recreated the Battle of Orgreave in 2001, almost rewriting history

Deller is both preserving the memory of political struggles which no longer have force in the culture, and indicating how contemporary sensibilities have come detached from those histories which have formed it. (Nash: 2006: 49)