punctum, aphex twin, interpellation, maple syrup, etc etc

Osucha:

I was really interested in the idea that a portrait makes the private into the public, and how one can confront the "taxonomic gaze" (78) of biopower and commodity.

What happens when the private-turned public is then observed in private? Is this not what Barthes calls for in Camera Lucida, and related to the theme of poesis we've encountered throughout the semester? Perhaps it goes beyond Barthes to suggest that the Aunt Jemima logo punctures, but there is a sort of poesis in reflecting on its cliche as Osucha does in this piece. The image's frozenness in time gives Osucha the room to write its history and de[t][r]ail the curation of its referent. This draws out entanglements between representation and commodity, and begs for a broader engagement with the medium of photography. Osucha's reflections aspire to explode common sense accumulations regarding photography by exposing underlying conversations between capitalism, privacy, and race.

Dyer:

"Further, movie lighting hierarchises. It indicates who is important and who is not" (102). There are lots of sentences that read like this. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but this piece often seems to say 'this is what cinema and photography are' rather than 'historically, this is what cinema and photography have done.'

What about questions of convention and aesthetics? For example, the way that compositional strategies of ambient music bend traditions of foreground/background. Aphex Twin isn't just about complicated drums - the drums stage a tension that form space for an astoundingly gorgeous textural background. Arguably, the background can become the foreground. Dyer almost seems to imply cinema is incapable of similarly sophisticated aesthetic frames. Are we so archetypally bound - can we not have different relationships with meaning and light/dark?

"The equation of seeing with knowledge is also one with power" (104).
I read this passage on Foucault as implying that visual metaphors are everywhere, and inseparable from knowledge and power. There are strange things at stake here. First off, is this a form of invisibility for blacks, or just a different or reduced visibility?

How does this interplay with something like interpellation?
Could all of this be considered a form of erasure?

I'm not sure if these are useful directions to go in.. but with the Dyer, I'm left tugging at questions of technology and discourse, as well as aesthetics and sensory phenomena.