viz.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine, via Of Another Fashion

This week, I want to focus on a site I discovered when I was trying not to work. While browsing fashion blogs, I encountered Of Another Fashion, a digital archive of "the not quite hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of US women of color." In recuperating these women as alternative icons, the site emphasizes the complex historical intersections of public and private as they play out through clothing choices. It also provides needed role models to counter the often problematic and still white-dominated fashion industry.

Steve Davis, via Lens

As a sort of continuation of my post two weeks ago about The Goggles' Welcome to Pine Point, I want to focus this week on Steve Davis' As American Falls. This series of photos documents American Falls, the now-declining Idaho town where Davis grew up. Davis describes the town's death as "as slow as it is unspectacular," and these images produce a feeling of stillness that differs in interesting ways from the retroactive intimacy that the Goggles' project produces.

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

 "Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today?  TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways.  One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

Nico in 1990 and 2010, France; Irina Werning

This week, I want to draw attention to Irene Werning's Back to the Future project (website probably not safe for work; there is a small amount of nudity), in which the artist meticulously reconstructs images from her subjects' pasts. The results are always impressive, often funny, and sometimes touching in their illustration of how much and how little changes with the passage of time.

The Anime Within, Elena Dorfman

The image above is from a photo essay on the Mother Jones website. The essay, entitled "The Anime Within," was disappointing to me, and while I don't want to malign Dorfman's project, especially since I am glad to see cosplay getting attention in a publication that might not normally address it, I do want to critique some of the messages that these images send.

Image Credit: screen capture from CookingUpAStory.com

I sat down in front of the television this Tuesday to watch the PBS premier of Dirt! The Movie on Independent Lens. I had been looking forward to seeing this documentary about the soil cylce and its importance on agriculture, health and geopolitics, and I had even planned to write about it for this week's post. As you can see, that plan fell through: I went in expecting a dirt-y movie, but mostly what I got was a mess. While there was plenty of titular soil in Dirt!, the film came across as a random collection of dirt-related vignettes that were either purely repetitive or entirely unrelated. In all fairness, cutting the film down to fit a one-hour running time may be responsible for the disjointed presentation, but most reviews of its Sundance screening agree that it is an unnecessarily rambling documentary. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I had spent that morning talking to David Parry about the effects of internet technology and networked space on the established institutions of democracy, and as POV took over my television screen with its adapted running of Food, Inc., I began to think about documentary films-- and, in particular, films that intend to effect social and democratic change-- in the online time and space of the internet. Thinking about documentary film within a networked social space reminded me, fortuitously, of Cooking Up A Story, an internet hybrid that bills itself rather oddly as "an online television show and blog about people, food, and sustainable living." More about soil, sardines and the web-lives of food-docs (including video) after the break.

Screen shot of narrated slide show, Shelter for the Scarred

 featured on Washington Post website

Photographer: Carol Guzy

This past week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments considering the constitutionality of U.S. v. Stevens, a case that makes it a federal crime to make and sell visual images of animal cruelty.  Although originally created by Congress to curb the market for "crush videos"--images of people in high heel shoes stomping on small animals for the purposes of titillating the viewer--the statute contains language so vague that it led the justices to propose a slew of bizarre hypotheticals ranging from the artistic value of images of force-feeding fowl for foie gras to the possibility of a pay-per-view human sacrifice channel.  Now I have to admit that I am slightly shaky on all of the legal issues at stake here, but this transcript of the oral arguments certainly made for some interesting reading.  Moreover, and not surprisingly, many of the questions raised within the oral arguments align with issues we often consider with respect to documentary studies and visual culture.

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

In the viz. archive, Dale quotes a 1979 interview with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in which he insists that "if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs." Re-watching Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which offers a strangely beautiful vision of Antarctica, I was reminded of the late-19th-century scientific drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Both give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange.