viz.

See this earlier discussion of iconographic photography on the campaign trail.

First spotted at Wonkette

Many of you may have seen the story in the New York Times yesterday about a comic that has been introduced in Germany to teach students about the Holocaust. (A brief portion from an English translation appears below.) This week, 25 Feb. through 2 Mar., is actually Holocaust Awareness Week, so some attention is being paid to issues surrounding the teaching of the Holocaust in this and other countries. More examples, after the jump.

Continuing with the recent trend of discussing the fallacies of photography, as well as pictures with guns in them:

Behold, the generic and intimidating Lego "Bad Guy" for their new Indiana Jones series:

Image: www.lego.com

As you may realize, Lego is engaging in a bit of revisionism: in the original films (at least in the first and third films), the "Bad Guys" were Nazis. Yet notice here that something is conspicuously absent from this little guy (in Lego lingo, a "minifig")...

Photo by Marcio Madeira for men.style.com; first spotted at Boing Boing

So I'm not surprised to see that this particular aesthetic has made its way onto the runways and into the designs of John Galliano; I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner (maybe it has? anyone?). What's interesting to me is the particular form these designs take, with their unmistakably medieval inflection: these designs are as much about the Inquisition as they are about Guantanamo. Is this trenchant (or maybe obvious) political critique, drawing a connection between the draconian measures of the Bush administration (so barbaric! so medieval!)? Or does it go too far, making light of serious infractions by implicitly connecting Lynndie England with court jesters and clowns?

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

Manohla Dargis just published her NYT review of Lake of Fire, a new documentary directed by Tony Kaye about the "abortion wars" in the U.S. (Kaye is probably most famous as the director of American History X.) Apparently, Kaye has been making this film for over sixteen years, and the duration of his effort may show in the length of the film, which clocks in at 152 minutes.

This video does contain some pretty disturbing imagery of people receiving shock therapy and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. So consider yourself warned before you click "play."

I just came across this nifty new feature from blogspot called "Blogger Play." Its designers describe Blogger Play as "a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!"

While it may not actually be as exciting as their exclamation point suggests, it's still pretty mesmerizing. Most of the photos are pretty mundane, lots of them are weird, and of course there are tons and tons of baby pictures.