edhall@randvax.UUCP (Ed Hall) (02/04/85)
A point to ponder: the camera itself can be an instrument of degradation. To take one's clothes off or to engage in particular sexual acts isn't the degrading thing--it's the camera that makes such things degrading. There is something fundamentally different between written and photographic pornography. A photograph of someone turns them into an object. That's the nature of photography, more so than any other pictorial art. Through the photograph, the photographic subject becomes completely passive. Once a picture is taken, that image can be used any way someone possessing it sees fit. Primitive cultures almost uniformly fear being photographed, as they feel that part of their essence is somehow being captured by the photographer. What does all this have to do with pornography? Just this: you don't have to show that sex and nudity are degrading to say that photographs of them are. -Ed Hall decvax!randvax!edhall
tracy@hcrvx1.UUCP (Tracy Tims) (02/12/85)
decvax!randvax!edhall:
A photograph of someone turns them into an object.
Through the photograph, the photographic subject becomes
completely passive.
A photograph of someone is an object, it doesn't turn that person into one. I
think that degradation is caused by people who confuse (in negative ways) the
photograph (or the written description) of the person with the person.
A person who understands that the two are not AT ALL the same thing will not
personify the photograph with "passivity" and will certainly not project that
passivity onto the real person.
Taking a photograph produces a photograph, not degradation! Degradation can
exist with or without photographs, and photographs can exist with or without
degradation! It's obvious that any essential correlations between the two
will not be true to fact!
You can say that frequently, photographs are perceived in degrading ways by
certain people. But that's only a statistical observation and says far more
about the person watching than it does about the photograph itself.
Is a photograph alone in a forest degrading?
Tracy Tims {linus,allegra,decvax}!watmath!...
Human Computing Resources Corporation {ihnp4,utzoo}!...
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 416 922-1937 ...hcr!hcrvx1!tracy
PS. If you want to say that because photographs are more immediately
real than other images or symbols of human beings this makes
it easier for unsane people to project their degraded ideas onto
the real person, I might agree with you.
It's the unsane people with the degraded ideas that are the problem.
Talking about photographs is shifting responsibility away from the
true problem!