viz.

I recently posted a new page to the theory section of viz. that explores the photographic theory of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

Image credit: Nebojsa Seric Shoba

"Battle of Waterloo. Belgium. 1815"

Lens, The New York Times 

Over the past two weeks, Lens, the photography and photojournalism blog component of the New York Times, has featured two different photographic collections concerned with memory, trauma, and war.  Nebojsa Seric Shoba's "Battlefields" is comprised of images of former battle sites.  Shoba returned to photograph the places where the Battle of Brooklyn (1776) or the Battle of Waterloo (1815) were fought.  Rather than return to earlier places, Maciek Nabrdalik took portraits of Holocaust survivors, focusing closely on the faces of his subjects as they are lit against a stark black background.  Both sets of images press the viewer to consider the possibilities and failures inherent in any attempt to make memory visible.

Image credit: Underwood and Underwood 

Over past week, as I reworked a syllabus for a course on Photography and Literature, I spent some time skimming through the online finding aids and databases that catalog the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.  The Stereograph collection at the HRC seems particularly fascinating—it contains over 4,000 images, most of which date to the period between 1870 and 1900.  Introducing students to stereographs can form a jumping off point for considering the intersections of vision, modernity, science and technology, early photography, and tourism.

Image credit: screen shot of The New Orleans Kids with Camera Project

For our class on social documentary film, we screen Martin Bell’s Streetwise—a documentary that follows young homeless kids through their daily routines.  Our class discussion always considers the question of consent and the issue of exploitation with subjects who are so young.  This is an issue that always arises when there are cameras trained on kids—recently, however, we also considered the question of training kids to work with cameras.  Over the last several years there have been many projects that seek to empower children by providing them with cameras and an opportunity to discuss their artwork. The New Orleans Kid Camera Project attempts to offer an “unfiltered view of New Orleans through the eyes of its youth.”  These organizations— for instance, Kids with Cameras and The New Orleans Kid Camera Project and films like Born into Brothels—are surely providing an excellent experience for young people who might not otherwise have had access to cameras and a space to discuss artwork. Although these projects that provide kids with cameras claim to offer a therapeutic experience for participants and access to an innocent vision through the photographs for viewers, many of the issues of consent and exploitation are still at play here.

Image credit: screen shot of Harlan County, USA 

Over the past few weeks my students have been discussing several documentary films and a recurrent topic has been the line between an emotional appeal and an exploitative image of the body in pain.  We have considered key scenes in the documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) in which director Barbara Kopple closely trains her camera on a man struggling to breathe through the pain of black lung.  We will also discuss the inclusion of several open-casket shots of a child’s dead body in Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984).  The ethics of documentarians is a topic I’ve considered before on this site, but this week my student’s surprised me by probing the distinction between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain. 

Image Credit: Sarlandière, Jean-Baptiste. Anatomie méthodique, ou Organographie humaine en tableaux synoptiques, avec figures.

(Paris: Chez les libraires de médecine, et chez l'auteur, 1829).

Historical Anatomies on the Web 

This week I thought I play far afield from my usual subject areas by exploring the image database for the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division.  This database--Historical Anatomies on the Web--showcases many high-quality digital images of the NLM’s collection of illustrated anatomical atlases dating from the 15^th to the 20^th century.  The quality of the images, the detailed historical introductions to each anatomical atlas, and the descriptions of the illustration techniques all contribute to the immense pedagogical potential of this collection.

Image credit: screen shot of Emergence of Advertising in America database 

On March 26^th  Noel will be leading our workshop on Best Practices for Digital Images here at the DWRL and in preparation for that meeting many of us at viz. are compiling several blog postings on image databases.  This week Rachel posted about Radical Software—a database that provides access to work done in the ‘seventies with the creation of and theorizing about digital and video media.  I’d like to take us back even further to a database dedicated to making available early advertising images from the mid-nineteenth century through to the 1920s.  I found Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 to be extremely entertaining to browse and can easily imagine integrating it into my classroom practice.

Rachel’s post this past week about the low-fi appeal of recent music videos raises similar questions to those surrounding a recent controversy over a digitally altered image stripped of its status as a World Press Photo contest winner.  And, what was the alteration that led to this disqualification?  Third prize winner in Sports Features, Stepan Rudik removed a foot from the finished photograph.  World Press Photo, an organization known for promoting professional standards in photojournalism largely through the means of awarding one of the most prestigious photography prizes, disqualified Rudik because the jury discovered that he had digitally altered one of the images in his photo-essay submission. Both the low-fi aesthetics of the OKGO video and the field of professional photojournalism privilege a definition of technical prowess that does not include manipulation of the image beyond much capturing and cropping.  The value of the image and the skill of the image-makers, in both of these respects, reside in the moment the photograph is shot and not at any other point in the process in which the photograph is made.