Emily Lederman's blog

Image credit: Chipotle 

What do Chipotle’s animated ads tell us about contemporary food discourse, animal rights, and Chipotle itself?

Five days before a significant Texas, and Austin, Election Day, I’m stepping back to consider the visual rhetoric employed during Wendy Davis’s famous filibuster and the subsequent protests for women’s reproductive rights at the Texas capitol. I’m particularly interested in the claiming of UT’s particular shade of burnt orange in support of Davis and the revision of the longhorn symbol into a uterus and ovaries.

from buzzfeed.com

In his 2010 text, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography, Matthew Brower considers the constructed nature of wildlife photography and what it tells us about historical understandings of human-animal relations. Brower is the curator of the University of Toronto Art Centre and a lecturer in museum studies in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Beginning with an analysis of early American photographs of taxidermy, his text examines the practice of “camera hunting” in the nineteenth century, the invention of the photographic blind and Abbott Thayer’s use of photographs to make arguments about animal coloration and camouflage. Brower argues that examining these photographic practices illustrates how they construct a particular narrative of the relationship between animals and humans. Brower suggests that photos of perceived “wild animals” are staged to tell a particular story about the historical constitution of the animal and human-animal interaction.

Image Credit: killingtime.com

These days, the best cocktail bars are taking their ice very seriously. The cut, size, and clarity of the ice are considered key factors in the content of a drink. Cocktail bars like Austin’s (and New York’s) Weather Up organize their drink menu by the shape of the ice. This post examines the increasing focus on the appearance of cocktail ice.

Image credit: Foreign & Domestic, by Aimee Wenske

As Deb noted in the last viz. post, recently many social media users have taken to posting photos of animals, usually puppies and kittens, as a means to demonstrate empathy in times of (both personal and public) trauma and tragedy. Animals may help us deal with our pain even in their visual form. (In person, they certainly benefit us!) I’m interested in how this use of animal visuals as an antidote to pain relates to the popular use of animal figures to sell the food we eat, such as the currently hip image of the pig.