Quote/Between the eyes / David Levi Strauss

It's effectiveness- the only applicable measurement of propaganda- derives from the historical amnesia of most Americans and the perennial desire to reduce the scale and significance of atrocities by attributing them to lone, monstrously evil madmen. The New Public's image contains everything one needs to know about the analogy for it to be effective, and reflects the subtle manipulations of that analogy visually. Saddam Hussein is Hitler. What's not to believe?

But belief itself is vulnerable to the kind of massive propaganda assault and general degradation of information that accompanied ( and will certainly follow) the Gulf War. The crisis of belief we are experiencing is much larger than a simple mistrust of photographs. It involves the wholesale, active relinquishing of our public right to know. When the manipulation and control of all forms of public imaging have become this pervasive, this complete, it is more than ever necessary to resist, to reassert individual initiative in the production, reception and use of images, and to find new ways to reinvest images with "believability" -before belief itself becomes part of the collateral damage.


P78/Photography and Belief


If material conditions need to be redescribed, more painstakingly and in novel forms, in order to be reinvested with " believability," then we can surely develop the form- and the means of dissemination- to do so.
- Martha Rosler, "Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Ethical Considerations"

P71/Photography and Belief