I came across (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, through Conscientious today… a great link to Jim Johnson’s post regarding “Vividness”… See his preliminary e-paper here, and this post Photographic Conventions & Their Vicissitudes: The Irony of “Vividness” .
For me, the notion of the negative potential of “othering” that I’ve been thinking about – and “visual oblivion” that has been rattling around in my brain is articulated quite interesting in Jim Johnson’s post.

Still gnawing at me …

Photographic conventions – Transference of Compassion
Training viewer’s to see / Indoctrination / Perceptual Sensitivity…
“visual oblivion”
“othering”
and now “Vividness”…

Learning from the visual cultural landscape… Somewhere in this a parallel to the problems of empty (draining off) symbolism in the architectural debate contained with in the book “Learning from Las Vegas” … but yet still wanting to embrace “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”… by Robert Venturi.