This is so not a good idea..

So I read some political commentator or someone quoted somewhere or other as saying that nowadays, any idiot with a blog can publish his opinions for the whole world to see. Clearly, the idea intrigued me. So, here I am.

Turns out, this whole blog thing looks suspiciously like a livejournal. I guess we never outgrow our middle school years. Hopefully, this one is a little more profound.

I'm just going to jump right into this. I'm sure there will be lots of self-righteous, political entries to come, but for now we will start with my other passion: the arts.

I saw Oliver Stone's Salvador today in my cinema studies class, and it was amazing. I've been reading Robert Capa's autobiographical account of WWII, Slightly Out of Focus and Susan Sontag's On Photography (both of which are completely brilliant) and the issues raised in both just freaking came together before my eyes in Salvador.

There is one moment in the film where two photojournalists are climbing a hill covered with bodies (campesinos killed by the U.S. backed government) and one of them is talking about Capa- how he captured not just how people died but why they died- and says he hopes to one day take his own Capa picture. This moment seems to me a very profound metaphor for the photojournalist/ war photographer. Climbing up the mountains of dead, but with the best of intentions. searching for that perfect shot, for fame but also for the impact it might have. Their cameras are their weapons, impotent in the short term but they might (and do) eventually help those they photograph in a certain way.

I'm still wrestling with the ethics of all this, the exploitative nature of photography and even documentary film. It is at once aggressive and impotent, selfless and exploitative. Maybe it comes with the territory, I don't know for sure yet. This is all still theoretical bullshit anyway.. I won't really know unless I wind up doing this for real, but I'm willing to bet the same problems would still exist while out in the field. Thinking... but it might still be worth it in the end. I could stomach a little self-loathing if it meant really making a difference. I think.