Louie Palu's Mira Mexico Project: Who Controls What You See? Louie Palu - The New America Foundation
go to original May 16, 2013

Mira Mexico Demonstration (NewAmericaFoundation)

Everyday, newspaper editors must decide where to place the day’s most violent images – the ones depicting drug use, gun violence and war. They must determine what to show, and what to hide – which images will help tell a story, and which ones will merely sensationalize it.

My project, Mira Mexico, challenges a newspaper reader to think more critically about those decisions by stepping into that editing role.  Using the photos I took of the Mexican drug war, I’ve created a newspaper that can be easily disassembled and reconstructed. The newspaper contains 16 photos total, eight that do not relate to violence and eight that focus on violence or the drug business. Only eight pictures can be viewed at one time. Watch the video above for a demo on how the newspaper assembly works.

Once the newspaper comes apart it can be reassembled in any order. With violent images on one side and non-violent images on the other, the reader must become the editor, curator or even censor, choosing how many violent or non-violent photos are exposed. The goal of Mira Mexico: help readers understand the underlying politics of representation and message manipulation that influence the vehicles relaying our news and facts.

This project was supported by a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellowship at the New America Foundation and some of the fieldwork with a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Check out more of my work here: www.louiepalu.com and follow me on twitter: @loupalu.

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