This is a fairly good case study in why it’s so important to click through. And why it’s so important to read captions and statements that accompany photographs.
What you see above is a screencap of a Contact Blog post that appeared in my RSS feeds. There is an interesting old (or old-looking) photograph of two men, and below, the text of the post, which begins:
Steven Beckly has collected together some great vintage images of gay couples in response to the US army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.
I assumed, based on this text, that Beckly has been digging in archives, finding photographs of gay couples — which made me very, very curious about what sort of source he’s using to find old images. It’s not like there were a ton of out-of-closet gay folks in the early days of photography. I’m sure there are lots of old photographs of gay people, and I’m sure there are even a non-trivial number of photographs of gay couples, but are those relationships recorded in a way that makes the relationship clear? If so, that’s awesome.
Well, I tried to click through, and was somewhat frustrated, because neither link in the post actually leads to the photoset it describes. (Here is the link.)
A bit of clicking did bring me to the set however, where I found this text by Beckly:
“Uncivil Unions” and “Hush” are examinations of contemporary notions regarding queer identity and relationships through the recontextualization of vintage and archival photographs. Using found images as the source materials, the surfaces of past relationships are extracted to establish a new and common meaning through a variety of digital methods.
Some photographs are strategically cropped, shifting the focus of what was originally documented; other photographs are digitally stitched together, merging disconnected identities to form new relationships; finally, other photographs are unaltered, simply presented in this new context. By such means, unknown histories are re-worked and re-presented as commentary on social and political issues.
In other words, there is no way of telling whether the people in these photographs are gay or straight or what their relationships were; this is not a presentation of real historical relationships, but a sort of photographic alternate history — an exercise in the manipulation of images by cropping, by photoshopping, and by recontextualizing.
It’s not an uninteresting exercise, but it’s entirely different from what is described in the Contact post. I can only assume that the person who wrote that post looked at the images Beckly presented and perhaps gave a cursory glance to the very top and very bottom of his statement, but did not actually stop to read it.
And if I hadn’t been spurred by curiosity to go digging on Beckly’s site, I might easily have reblogged that image and Contact’s text without further scrutiny. I wouldn’t be surprised to know that some folks already have.
I don’t always click through on posts like this (although I try to make sure I do so before posting about them on 1/125). Like most folks, I can’t give everything on the internet as much time as it deserves. But it’s important (if a little disconcerting) to remember that one’s understanding of a given image, or story, or video clip does tend to be proportional to the amount of time one spends finding out about its context.
Edit: I emailed the Contact Blog folks to let them know they might want to modify their text.
