photographs

Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls: Photographing the Bodies We Want

Rion Sabean, posed as a pin-up girl, with cordless drill

Image Credit: Rion Sabean

H/T: Melanie Haupt

My favorite way to take a break from dissertation research is to visit Facebook.  Some days, I’m lucky enough to be entertained by my friends, as when Melanie Haupt posted a provocative link to an article about male pin-ups.

Criminal Photography

(see image description below for credit)

Who is this dapper gentleman? Who was the photographer who composed this photo? And what is the subject waiting for?

Labor Archives

Image Credit: Red Scare archive

The image above-- an anti-labor cartoon claiming that the sloth of American workers (who only want to work a measly 8 hours a day and spend the rest of the day lounging with their pipes) was endangering American competitiveness with Weimar Germany (and we know how well things worked out for them)-- could serve as "exhibit A" in the argument that entrenched interests never view ANY concession as reasonable. The 8-hour work day has by now become such a sacred cow in American society that it seems almost natural, but the 8-hour day did not spring up miraculously on the 8th day of creation. Along with many other rights and protections that we currently take for granted, it was the result of a decades-long struggle of workers against the egregious abuses of industrial captial in the heady days of its American youth. "Exhibit A" comes from Red Scare, an image database hosted by the City University of New York that documents the social upheaval of 1918-1921. Digital archives like Red Scare and Labor Arts preserve and present a history of America's labor movement through photographs, cartoons, fliers, songbooks and other visual artifacts.

Fort Hood in Images

Fort Hood

 Image Credit: The Guardian

As the memorial service for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting begins, I want to spend some time considering the visual representations of this event in the media.  Photographs representing the shooting seem to mirror our conflicted understanding of this event as both a military and a domestic tragedy.  In the absence of more information about the shooter and his motives, this ambiguity marks the photographs that appear online and in print.  Some photographs evoke Columbine, Virginia Tech or 9/11 by focusing on groups of mourners and the buildings where the shooting took place.  In so doing, these images emphasize the effects of violence on a place and a community.  However, other photographs more closely resemble traditional war photography in which the soldier is represented through metonymic devices such as a uniform or a gun. 

Chuck Close: Daguerreotypes and (Re)production

 

Chuck Close

Image Credit:  Chuck Close

Via Austin Museum of Art

I recently went to the Chuck Close exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art, which gave me a lot to think about. Close is known for the scale of his portraits (think: 9-by-7 foot painting of a face).  He is also known for paintings that make you think you are seeing a photo. As Donald and Christine McQuade explain in Seeing and Writing 3, his style is "photorealism or super-realism, which attempts to recreate in paint the aesthetic and representational experience of photography."   In the recent exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art, Close's scale is not quite so collosal; there are several 8-by-6 foot tapestries, but most of the images are more like 2-by-1 feet (the digital pigment print pictured above), or even 15 very small images, which are 11-by-9 inches.  There are no paintings.

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