I had booked a seat on the FotoFest Creative Conversations Zoom talk for today and I’m just going to do a short write up – not because it was uninteresting, but because it was incredibly dense with information. It featured David Levi Strauss in conversation with Roberto Tejada. Strauss read passages from his new book Co-illusion Dispatches from the end of Communication.
In his book Strauss foregrounds the new concept of “iconopolitics” in which words and images lose their connection to reality. “Old morality is dead!” Strauss exclaims. We live in a world where words and images no longer agree and this has created an intensely surreal situation. Communication via social media reigns supreme and demands our attention, yet we fail to scrutinize the content that is served up to us. Strauss states that this book is episodic. There is no plot – its about characters. The first section of the book are dispatches written by Strauss from both the 2016 Democratic and Republican conventions – the staged spectacles. In the second part of the book he writes “in the voices of the regime” and those of big tech companies. His book is illustrated with photographs by Susan Meiselas and Peter van Agtmael. All sorts of topics – quite mind boggling actually – emerged: surveillance (big tech/data) are stealing the private experience – this is an assault on social subjectivity; photos of political conventions – not unrelated to stagecraft. The electoral politics = a spectacle. Strauss covered so many concepts in a Berger-like fashion. Its a talk one really needs to listen to alongside the book, as the book is obviously key to understanding.
Fotofest will be archiving the talk on their YouTube channel. At the date of uploading this post, it has not been uploaded yet. I did, however, come across an MIT podcast where David Levi Strauss discusses his book (see bibliography below).
Bibliography
Glasstire (2020) Creative Conversations/digital: David Levi Strauss with Roberto Tejada | Glasstire. At: https://glasstire.com/events/2020/07/31/creative-conversations-digital-david-levi-strauss-with-roberto-tejada/ (Accessed 12/08/2020).
Image Politics with David Levi Strauss (2020) Directed by The MIT Press Podcast. 21:22. At: https://mitpress.podbean.com/e/image-politics-with-david-levi-strauss/ (Accessed 12/08/2020).
Lynda Kuit Photography Level 3 