Selling the Day Before.
Feb. 26th, 2008 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19I discovered some photographs through a blogsite that I frequent fairly regularly, and they sent me along various paths of thought in their wake. The photographs, collected here, are for a series of advertisements that ran last year for The Cape Times, South Africa's English-language newspaper.
My first thought was to be appalled by them. I found them (and still find them on certain levels) completely distasteful and horrifying. Then I began analyzing the idea of "trading disasters," something that Akira Mizuta Lippit, a professor of film and critical theory, advises against in his essay on the Yamahata Yosuke photographs of Nagasaki the day after the atomic bombing of that city. There is an emphasis on American disasters (two out of four), and the other atrocities have equally horrifying contemporaries. Why these? Because the stock footage was available? Because they had a certain popularity? Because someone made a value judgment about which catastrophes in human history have more weight?
The one thing, however, that strikes me most painfully in looking at the advertisements, is that each of these examples illustrates the day before death and destruction. This underscores the notion that there is nothing in this world that equates with profound and irrefutable change so much as death does. I've been reflecting on death very seriously in the last few months, perhaps for obvious reasons, pondering ideas of preparedness and acceptance--all those bits and pieces of grief and the way you get past it when it comes knocking on your door. I recently came to the conclusion that there is no preparing and in some ways no acceptance in the aftermath. There is before and there is after, and that is all there is. These photographs beautifully capture that sense, even as they completely and utter repel me with their brutal depiction of ideas that in my view should never be part of a package deal to sell anything.
My first thought was to be appalled by them. I found them (and still find them on certain levels) completely distasteful and horrifying. Then I began analyzing the idea of "trading disasters," something that Akira Mizuta Lippit, a professor of film and critical theory, advises against in his essay on the Yamahata Yosuke photographs of Nagasaki the day after the atomic bombing of that city. There is an emphasis on American disasters (two out of four), and the other atrocities have equally horrifying contemporaries. Why these? Because the stock footage was available? Because they had a certain popularity? Because someone made a value judgment about which catastrophes in human history have more weight?
The one thing, however, that strikes me most painfully in looking at the advertisements, is that each of these examples illustrates the day before death and destruction. This underscores the notion that there is nothing in this world that equates with profound and irrefutable change so much as death does. I've been reflecting on death very seriously in the last few months, perhaps for obvious reasons, pondering ideas of preparedness and acceptance--all those bits and pieces of grief and the way you get past it when it comes knocking on your door. I recently came to the conclusion that there is no preparing and in some ways no acceptance in the aftermath. There is before and there is after, and that is all there is. These photographs beautifully capture that sense, even as they completely and utter repel me with their brutal depiction of ideas that in my view should never be part of a package deal to sell anything.
