"Seeing Like a State": Paul Strand

Olha a belezinha que chegou no meu e-mail:

"While working as Director of the Mexican government's Oficina de Fotografía y Cinematografía in 1933-34, world-leading modernist photographer Paul Strand was given the charge “to demonstrate in an objective manner the possibility of a social regimen whose justice is rooted in all men working and all equally obtaining the satisfaction of their needs.” This directive would radically transform his art and aims up until his death in 1976 and set it on a course running opposite to the emerging neoliberal consensus forged at the same time and best summed up by Margaret Thatcher’s latter-day dictum “There’s no such thing as society.” At the heart of Strand's enterprise was an effort to see like such a social regimen, and he worked to do so on behalf of many including Nkrumah’s Ghana, Nasser’s Egypt, the PCI’s Italy, and the Senate La Follette Committee’s United States. This talk will explore what it is exactly that one sees in this statist mode and how it differs from the Thatcherian form of seeing that, in the main, we have all come to adopt as our own."