For our third meeting on May 5, 2020, we extracted ourselves from the early '80s vintage of Baudrillard and Krauss, and propeled forward to what's essentially become an insta-classic: a chapter from Errol Morris's 2011 Believing is Seeing. The first chapter of the book is about how photographer Roger Fenton staged photos in 1855 during the Crimean War, an often-referenced masterpiece of obsessive sleuthing by Morris.
AP Photo / Ben Curtis, 2006. Tyre, Lebanon.
Digging a little deeper in the book, I was captivated by a later chapter, too, which is an interview with Ben Curtis, the Associated Press Middle East photographer. The chapter is called "It All Began With a Mouse," and is an investigation into the politics of war photography, focusing on a controversial photo that Curtis published of a Mickey Mouse toy in Lebanon in 2006.
Some of the main topics born from our conversation were posing/staging, iconography, metonymy, time scales, and agency vs. structure.