Paul Frosh
My earlier research focused on photography and cultural production, especially the stock photography and visual content industries. Since then I have published work on consumer culture and national conflict, the construction of civil and national solidarity in Israeli television coverage of suicide bombings, 'media witnessing' (theorizing the relationship between contemporary media and practices of witnessing), and the aesthetics of television. More recent publications include work on transnational television (the reception of Mad Men in Israel), the current state of the stock photography industry, and the aesthetics of digital images and interfaces. I am currently working on a joint research project about iconic photographs, Israeli media and Israeli collective memory. My latest book is The Poetics of Digital Media (2018), published by Polity.
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Books by Paul Frosh
Show notes
Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science.
‘When I find myself puzzled by some weird thing in digital visual culture, Paul Frosh is my go-to thinker. This book counters the wide suspicion that poetics is formalist or frivolous and shows how the deepest questions of justice, ethics and the public world are poetic ones. It is a guide for the perplexed in these digital times.’
John Durham Peters, Yale University.
Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence.
The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects – screenshots, tagging, selfies, and more – the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. It investigates how the ‘given’ world we inhabit is given through media.
The Poetics of Digital Media is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.
Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Contents
List of Reproductions
Preface
1. Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images
2. From the Library to the Bank: The Emergence of Stock Photography
3. Shooting for Success: Stock Photography and the Production of Culture
4. The Archive, the Stereotype and the Image-Repertoire: Classification and Stock Photography
5. The Image of Romance: Stock Images as Cultural Performances
6. Rhetorics of the Overlooked: On the Communicative Modes of Stock Images
7. And God Created Photoshop: Digital Technologies, Creative Mastery and Aesthetic Angst
8. The Realm of the Info-Pixel: From Stock Photography to the Visual Content Industry
9. Conclusion
10. Sources and Bibliography
Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication
Edited by Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
‘Why are witnesses to salient socio-political events so important in our age of global media reporting? Testimonies are sometimes the only chance to arrive at more information which would, otherwise, have been swept under the carpet. This excellent book elaborates on, and challenges, the complex and
difficult roles of eye witnesses and of the media in truly innovative interdisciplinary ways. Everybody who deals with media in their everyday lives will be able togain new insights.’ — Professor Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK
‘This is a most valuable collection of essays. Innovative, engrossing and rewarding, it provides an excellent exploration of media witnessing and isd efinitely to be recommended.’ — European Journal of Communication
Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing
technologies. What is the truth status of such ‘media witnessing’, and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its
connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage?
These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Elihu Katz. Contributors include John Durham Peters, John Ellis, Günter Thomas, Tamar Liebes, Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Ashuri, Carrie Rentschler, Joan Leach, Roy Brand, and the editors, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Together they not only make a crucial intervention in ongoing debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications.
Available from http://www.palgrave.com/products/Title.aspx?pid=280405 and booksellers.
Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His publications include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Culture Industry (2003)
and Meeting the Enemy in the Living Room: Terrorism and Communication in the Contemporary Era (edited with Tamar Liebes, 2006).
Amit Pinchevski teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005).
Papers by Paul Frosh
This paper fleshes out the familiar terms of this critique (for which the author bears some responsibility), and the political-scholarly impulses it entails. And then it asks: is that all? Is there nothing remaining to be said about a cultural phenomenon like stock photography except that we would be better off without it? Or – reading it dialectically with the help of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson – that it (at best) fleetingly reveals the utopian dynamic nesting at the heart of capitalist modes of cultural production? Or are there other things we can learn from stock photography as a social and aesthetic practice: about the irreducibility of media to ontological essences, about the circulation of attention and the multifariousness of public representation, and about the generality of photographs as agents of similarity and connectivity among strangers? Thinking about stock photography beyond its traditional critique – treating it as a good ‘bad object’ - can open up new directions for assessing the public value of apparently debased forms.
Show notes
Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science.
‘When I find myself puzzled by some weird thing in digital visual culture, Paul Frosh is my go-to thinker. This book counters the wide suspicion that poetics is formalist or frivolous and shows how the deepest questions of justice, ethics and the public world are poetic ones. It is a guide for the perplexed in these digital times.’
John Durham Peters, Yale University.
Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence.
The Poetics of Digital Media explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects – screenshots, tagging, selfies, and more – the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. It investigates how the ‘given’ world we inhabit is given through media.
The Poetics of Digital Media is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.
Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Contents
List of Reproductions
Preface
1. Introduction: The Making of Ordinary Images
2. From the Library to the Bank: The Emergence of Stock Photography
3. Shooting for Success: Stock Photography and the Production of Culture
4. The Archive, the Stereotype and the Image-Repertoire: Classification and Stock Photography
5. The Image of Romance: Stock Images as Cultural Performances
6. Rhetorics of the Overlooked: On the Communicative Modes of Stock Images
7. And God Created Photoshop: Digital Technologies, Creative Mastery and Aesthetic Angst
8. The Realm of the Info-Pixel: From Stock Photography to the Visual Content Industry
9. Conclusion
10. Sources and Bibliography
Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication
Edited by Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
‘Why are witnesses to salient socio-political events so important in our age of global media reporting? Testimonies are sometimes the only chance to arrive at more information which would, otherwise, have been swept under the carpet. This excellent book elaborates on, and challenges, the complex and
difficult roles of eye witnesses and of the media in truly innovative interdisciplinary ways. Everybody who deals with media in their everyday lives will be able togain new insights.’ — Professor Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK
‘This is a most valuable collection of essays. Innovative, engrossing and rewarding, it provides an excellent exploration of media witnessing and isd efinitely to be recommended.’ — European Journal of Communication
Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing
technologies. What is the truth status of such ‘media witnessing’, and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its
connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage?
These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Elihu Katz. Contributors include John Durham Peters, John Ellis, Günter Thomas, Tamar Liebes, Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Ashuri, Carrie Rentschler, Joan Leach, Roy Brand, and the editors, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Together they not only make a crucial intervention in ongoing debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications.
Available from http://www.palgrave.com/products/Title.aspx?pid=280405 and booksellers.
Paul Frosh teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His publications include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Culture Industry (2003)
and Meeting the Enemy in the Living Room: Terrorism and Communication in the Contemporary Era (edited with Tamar Liebes, 2006).
Amit Pinchevski teaches in the Department of Communications and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005).
This paper fleshes out the familiar terms of this critique (for which the author bears some responsibility), and the political-scholarly impulses it entails. And then it asks: is that all? Is there nothing remaining to be said about a cultural phenomenon like stock photography except that we would be better off without it? Or – reading it dialectically with the help of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson – that it (at best) fleetingly reveals the utopian dynamic nesting at the heart of capitalist modes of cultural production? Or are there other things we can learn from stock photography as a social and aesthetic practice: about the irreducibility of media to ontological essences, about the circulation of attention and the multifariousness of public representation, and about the generality of photographs as agents of similarity and connectivity among strangers? Thinking about stock photography beyond its traditional critique – treating it as a good ‘bad object’ - can open up new directions for assessing the public value of apparently debased forms.
Many analyses of image testimonies in social media begin and end with the same assumption: that while social media are new means for circulating witnessing texts, they rarely provide their content. What we witness via Facebook, Twitter etc. tends not to be Facebook, Twitter, etc. In contrast, this paper asks what we can learn from instances where image testimonies are not just distributed through digital platforms, but also foreground key aspects of the medium itself. Proceeding through the close-reading of three examples, it explores how social media reconfigure existing modes of witnessing – eye-witnessing, flesh-witnessing and world-witnessing - to reveal the underlying techno-cultural potentialities and vulnerabilities of our networked lives. The power of these image testimonies derives not only from the topics they convey (injustice, suffering, death), but from their poetic ability to constitute digital networks themselves as witnessable worlds, as new domains of embodied being.