Wednesday, November 4, 2009

cofidant gaze (i think...?)

in the artical the "Cofadent Gaze" by Shekhar Deshpande, he writes about how he thought that national geographic should write an artical scince india has been the most contrabutive to the maganizine that they should write a huge artical. this artical i will like to provide my personal point, and that is i gartly dislike the artical while reading i felt slightly sick to my stomach(this is just a porsonal opion... nothing more). what i was able to read from his artical (past my sickening feeling), he wrote about india's and national geographic's relathionship. "The poverty in India, long a favorite and often the only reference for Western audiences is transformed in the pages of the magazine into an observable commodity, polished with gleaming light and perfection of the position of the objects, their eternal "readiness" at being photographed. A busy street in Calcutta and, an upper class housing colony and the back stage images at a fashion show, all become images of equal aptitude: they have an urge to satisfy the curiosity of the viewer while defining it.
This gives the magazine its real power". this pharagraph states that the images of poor and the damaged are what makes the magazine work and sell."It provides innocuous details of life in India, without any reference to the real troubles of the people or the global conditions in which the country is implicated in. The wars and the subsequent arms race since Independence are less important than the plight of urban poverty. The regional conflicts are more important than the difficult conditions of the people in keeping pace with their material wealth. One feels great for having encountered one's faint and fuzzy prejudices in palatable language and one feels good because we know that the country has done a lot of catching up in 50 years, but it has a lot of catching up to do if "catching up" has to mean something." this one shows how we find the pain in other humans a mental magnet that draws on our own ideals. that when things need to sell not only National Geographic but others as well, use the images and ideas to have us find out what is wrong...(please note that this is proboly the most horrible parageraphes one can do, with spelling errors).

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