Watching you lose your mind over The Wire has got me back on my bullshit, and I'm having a lot of fun tracking down critical readings. This article was really interesting, and seems like something you in particular might get a kick out of.
oh dude this fucking rocks. i printed this out at work yesterday so i could read and highlight it during my lunch break.
something that interested me a lot about season 1 of the wire was that we saw much more of the consequences of violence than the violence itself. and i think that helped the audience buy into what farber described here as the camera's evidential force. in season 1, the audience is introduced to the violence of the baltimore crime world largely through the surveillance and crime scene photographs traded between the cops and the characters like d'angelo. "as the major crimes detectives hone their craft . . . we as viewers gain much of our own plot knowledge and critical acumen through their investigation." the audience's critical acumen is measured against the police detail's mastery of surveillance, particularly photography. that mastery concerns actually taking the photos, of course, but also deploying them in an effective manner, like when mcnulty shows d'angelo wallace. we see the police's and the camera's power to document, corroborate, fabricate, and persuade. and as the audience develops this critical understanding of the cameras used within the narrative, we also develop a critical understanding of the cameras used to shape the narrative. the wire has this built-in sense of credibility given the past lives of david simon and ed burns, but the self-consciousness of the camera--especially in season 1--does a great job of inviting the audience to question the edges of whatever frame they present us with.
and speaking of david simon's former occupation, something i really loved about season 5 that i feel fits right in with farber's whole discussion was the emphasis on photography within the baltimore sun bullpen. (i think it was gus haynes who was always saying that stories need to run with "artwork"). david simon's journalism is obviously foundational to who he is as a fiction writer, but it's also foundational to who he is as a visual storyteller.
(on a tangentially related note, this article made me think a lot about the relationship between documentation/photography and post-modern performance artists. like, it's really cool how different iterations of the camera have been around for centuries, but it still feels like a tool specially crafted to examine post-modern landscapes. artists ranging from ana mendieta to richard long to gordon matta-clarke to the collective actions group (linking a really interesting read on their relationship to documentation) all understood the complicated implications of distilling their practices down to photographs, and they all did it masterfully. farber seems to have recognized something similar in the wire when discussing narrative frames vs. camera frames).
