Photography | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Museum Fatigue Reads, July 12, 2014

July 11, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

The Origins of Office Speak The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari The Case Against the Sharing Economy Laurie Taylor on the endangered art of ethnography Sidney D. Gamble Photographs How China’s Selden Map Rewrote History Digital Resources for Sinologists 1.0 Future Islands MET Museum Collection Online Brazilian Man Becomes Korean After 10 Plastic Surgeries We Are All Made of Stars How Did We Get Here (University Hall) at this Point of Time (the “Anthropocene”)? The […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: bodies, China, drones, ethnography, faculty, higher education, internet, jobs, language, Photography, rolling coal, sharing economy, virtual life

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The Mona Lisa: Art in the Age of Digital Consumption

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable images in the world. Perhaps second only to the Eiffel Tower, it is an icon of the tourist experience of Paris. So, when we arrived at the Louvre with thousands of other tourists, of course, the first thing we did was go to see it. I have heard that often when tourists first see the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre, the portrait is much smaller than they expect. The idea, […]

Categories: Museums, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips, Visual Anthropology • Tags: art, Mona Lisa, Photography, Pierre Bourdieu, tourism, visual anthropology, Walter Benjamin

University at Snelling 20×20: A Petcha Kutcha Study

February 14, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

How can students in a senior seminar present ideas to the class in a low-stakes way that might enjoyable and, above all, fast enough that we can get through all of them with time for brief discussion at the end of class? After discussing photography for two weeks, I wanted everyone in class to actually take photographs—to do a brief study on a subject or theme—and present it to the class. Ideally the subject or theme would be related in […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: Anthropology, petcha kutcha, Photography, senior seminar

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Reflections on Photography: Seeing and Feeling

February 9, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Roughly the first two weeks of this semester’s anthropology senior seminar we are taking a brief look at photography, perception and representation. My idea was that before we discuss visual anthropology or ethnographic film we should take some time to examine the human eye and the representational power of photography. Since different parts of anthropology broadly look at humans biologically (biocultural/physical anthropology) and as meaning-making creatures (sociocultural anthropology), I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose a biological/neurological description of […]

Categories: Teaching, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Class • Tags: camera lucida, Photography, roland barthes, senior seminar, visual anthropology

Demolishing Shanghai’s Old City, Spring 2006

December 12, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

Before it can be nostalgically remembered as “Shanghai’s Old City” and before newly constructed “traditional buildings” can be experienced by both foreign and domestic tourists as authentic “Chinese culture”, historical structures must be cleared. This afternoon I came across a set of photos I shot in Shanghai in April 2006, which show just such a clearing. The photos were taken in part of the old Chinese city section of Shanghai in the period between the local residents’ departure and the […]

Categories: End of Times, Photo Essays, State of Emergency, Urban • Tags: China, old chinese city, Photography, Shanghai, 拆

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A Haunting Photograph Revisited

June 9, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

In late spring 1999 I spent nearly four weeks traveling from Nanjing, where I was living at the time, overland through Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan. Fodor’s had hired me to update some chapters in their China travel guide, and after a year of fieldwork the opportunity to do some solo travel–and get paid for it–was a welcome opportunity. While most of my memories of that trip have faded, a select few are still very clear. I can’t remember […]

Categories: Essays • Tags: China, memory, Nanchang, Photography, revolutionary martyrs

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