You Ought to Be in Pictures

Notice how this image from the New York Times about today's news conference about the arrest of the Time Square Bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad points to what I have called an aesthetic of "mediated transparency" or "transparent mediation" in which the presence of computer monitors and digital display and capture technologies are foregrounded in an image. Ironically, one of the main sites to see this aesthetic at work is the Flickr and YouTube sites for the White House, where official photographers often use the lens to draw attention to how the president's image is mediated by computer screens and technical prostheses.