Jake Ptacek's blog

"Maybe These Maps Are Legends": Ghost Signs and the Traces of the Past

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:40 +0000

Austin, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

There is nothing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the water, or in the air we breathe but will be found in the universal Language of the Walls. ("The Language of the Walls," anonymous, 1855).

Maps are propositions as well as indexes, making visual arguments about our orientation in this world--a good map (whether road or otherwise) gets us somewhere, forces us to reconsider the relationship between us and the world. Advertising, that pernicious beasat, is also somewhere between sign and proposition. A visual referent to a thing--a bottle of beer, a pack of gum, an insurance service--an advertisement also makes an argument or, at the very least, presents a fantasy of (self-)orientation. But what happens when those relationships are obscured, when the fantasy becomes outdated? What happens when the ad remains after the product is gone?

Image, John Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene," 1835 from Wikimedia Commons

Advertising really becomes a science and a spectacle under the Victorians, who understood (and saw the signs of) the radically changing nature of capitalism. victorians pioneered advertising on the walls, as the sardonically frustrated narrator of "The Language of the Walls" notes. Advertising thus became a kind of "commodification of public space", as Sam Roberts and Sebastian Groes call it; an intrusion that we now take for granted began as a visual index of the transformation of public culture.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

The marks of this early advertising culture are all around us today, sometimes revealed--as in this photo--by the restructurations of late capitalism. As the photographer notes, this ghost sign only became visible after a local business had been pulled down. Ghost signs, then, function as both advertisement and map, indexing a previously obscured spatial relationship to the past. Often overlooked or unobserved, ghost signs write out--visually signify--a complex map of urban histories.

Galveston, TX, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

Multiple businesses can be encoded onto each other. Like a palimpsest, ghost signs narrate the derridean traces ("the mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present") of history (local, cultural, capital) in physical form. They are inscrutable maps as well as unobtainable fantasies; as such, they represent almost pure representation (italicize), as it were, as they now exist without a goal or purpose, "signifying nothing."

Baltimore, MD, Ghost Sign, image from Flickr

What would Proust do with Google Maps?

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

In David Sasake's blog post, "How to read Google Earth like Proust," he notes that Marcel Proust liked to read train timetables before bed. According to Alain de Botton, "[T]he mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust's imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields." Place names can float up in our subconsciousness, rekindling memories long forgotten like rabbits pulled out of a magician's hat. So what would Proust make of Google Maps, and especially Google's massive, ongoing "Street View" function, where an ever-expanding swath of the globe is mapped, photographed, and instantly accessible? What happens when you can view almost anyplace, anytime?

Screenshot from Google Maps

I'm asking because I spent the afternoon visiting places from my past, not in reality, but through Google Maps. That house above, appropriately blurry, is the house I lived in as a small child. Though hazy, as with memory, I can visit it anytime online; though I'm now some eight hundred miles and twenty years away from it. I can retake my morning walk to serve 6 am mass at the Catholic church, if I want. Or, as below, I can recreate the drives into the country that I--and every other underage smoker with a car--took on summer days a decade ago.

Screenshot from Google Maps

Or I can, if I want, stand at the very street corner where I said goodbye for the last time to my first college girlfriend (on a day when the shadows of the trees stretched out across the street in just the same way as below). But Google Street view is fickle: though I can wave goodbye forever, I can't (yet) stand at the streetcorner where I first met my wife.

Screenshot from Google Maps

And though I can stare down the street above forever--where, while being mugged at gunpoint, once upon a time I thought that empty billboard might be the last thing I would ever see--I can't at the moment recreate the view from my Catholic school's parking lot, or see the park my teenage friends and I would sneak out to after curfew.

The street view function of Google Maps seems tailor made for such Proustian reveries. Like memories, it's full of gaps. Places that you ought to be able to find aren't there. Places you never thought you'd see again are suddenly at your fingertips. What fascinates me is the power to recreate: to walk down streets you'd long forgotten and to recognize the incongruous, some detail that brings the past flooding back to you. Like so much on the internet today, there are whole communities dedicated to this kind of recovery of the past, though my favorite is Ogle Earth. I found it through Sasaki's aforementioned blog, and it's well worth checking out. Using Google Maps, Stefan Geens has mapped out one of the Hippie Trail routes through Afghanistan--a virtual recreation of a (now seemingly-impossible) past. Similarly, the website What Was There overlays historical information--particularly photography-- onto current Google Maps, allowing the user to "see" the past.

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

Though not yet a part of history, Jon Rafman's sometimes haunting (see the photograph at the top of this piece), sometimes comic, sometimes somewhere-between-the-two (see the photograph above) cullings from Google Street View seem a fitting place to end this post. Rafman's work, the best of which is featured here along with an excellent essay here, collapses the distinctions between the utilitarian and social value of Google's project and the "street photography" movement that flourished in Cartier-Bresson's wake. Rafman's images seem pulled from a collective (Proustian?) unconscious that also happens to be the obhjective world around us. He winnows out of the omnidirectional impassive cameras attached to Google's vehicles images that provoke social consciousness, laughter, even an occasional mystical awe at the world around us. Strangely enough, the seemingly quixotic, because practical, goal of Google Maps--the ability to plan routes in any part of the globe--has become a repository for half-a-decade's worth of what Cartier-Bresson would refer to as "decisive moments."

From Sea to Shining McDonald's, and Other Americas: Critical Cartography II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image by Stephen von Worley

Last week, I wrote about the power of cold-war era maps when it comes to visualizing Western attitudes towards the Soviet bloc, and, in the work of William Bunge, visualizing themselves. This week I want to continue my trip down critical cartography's rabbit-hole with an overview of maps that attempt to locate forms of the "American experience." How can aspects of daily life in America be represented visually? The following maps try to answer that question, in playful, political, and subversive ways.

The image above, Stephen von Worley recounts on his website, is one attempt to answer the question, "How far away can you get from the world of generic convenience?" Transforming each McDonald's in the contiguous 48 states into one dot, von Worley redraws the US as an enormous network of lights. (The answer to the question, by the way, is 145 miles, by car, in southwestern South Dakota.) The map makes a compelling, if simple, statement about the prevalence of corporate experience throughout America.

Image: New York Times

Jumping from the corporate to the political, this 2008 map from the New York Times charts a single voter's relative political influence in the US. States have been resized based on a comparison of state population with the number of electoral votes allotted (it should be noted that the state population does not accurately reflect the number of acutal voters). The larger the state, the larger the influence. The size of Wyoming and the Dakotas should come as no surprise to anyone, but one thing the map handily reveals is the relative power of voters in Washington, D.C., Vermont, and Rhode Island. As the commentary that accompanies the map suggests, visuals like these help reveal the "one-person one-vote" myth that's prevalently held on both sides of the ideological divide; the truth, as always, is much more complicated.

Image: The Big Picture

The map above comes from Frank Jacobs's Strange Maps blog, an excellent web resource for all maps non-traditional (you'll note several maps from this post there). It breaks down the American Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into the GDPs of each individual state, and then renames each state with the name of a country with a similar GDP. The result is a fascinating international picture. This map is rough, of course, and doesn't take into account a per capita GDP, but, as Jacobs explains it, "this map does serve two interesting purposes: it shows the size of US states' economies relative to each other (California is the biggest, Wyoming the smallest), and it links those sizes with foreign economies (which are therefore also ranked: Mexico's and Russia's economies are about equal size, Ireland's is twice as big as New Zealand's)." What emerges is a truly unique view of the American economy (check his website for a more detailed account of the map).

Image by Matthew Zook

By contrast, the maps above and below, created by the folks over at FloatingSheep, reveal a very different American experience. According to their website, the cartographers at Floating Sheep are "dedicated to mapping and analyzing user generated Google Map placemarks." While this can sound drily academic, the maps they generate are often anything but. As they note, Google Maps documents users "memories, feelings, biases, and reactions to places," and though the site is powered by serious analytic and academic work, the maps capture the "collective intelligence"--or maybe better yet the collective unconscious--of internet users. Above, the group has mapped Google Map references to bars versus Google Map references to grocery stores. More references to bars generates a red dot. More grocery stores, a yellow. Who knew that Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota would be bar central? (Actually, as someone who grew up smack dab in one patch of red and went to college in another, I did...) In the map below, data from the PriceofWeed website (sorry, it's an academic post, no link; I imagine you can find it if you want) is mapped onto the US, creating an interesting picture of high-productivity growing and import areas.

Image: FloatingSheep

Image: Strange Maps

To conclude, two maps that zoom in geographically, taking a closer look at America. The first map, above, was produced by Paramount in the late 1930's (several different dates are floating around on the internet) by a seemingly unknown cartographer. It's a map of studio locations and where they've stood in for--a geography of fantasy, or good ol' Hollywood wish fulfillment. It's sort of boggling to see Spain next to San Diego, or Sherwood Forest just north of the Red Sea. I find it a charming representation of global geography, and perhaps more proof that--as my Northern Californian friends would say--SoCal residents think they're at the center of the world.

I've saved my favorite map for last, a particularly evocative image from Denis Wood's ongoing Narrative Atlas of Boylan Heights. Long a kind of mythic cartographic project, Wood has been making creative, non-traditional maps of the Boylan Heights neighborhood in Raleigh, NC for over four decades. Parts of that project were recently published as Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, which is well worth looking into if maps interest you in the slightest. Wood, whose work has been featured on This American Life, makes maps of jack-o-lanterns, locations referenced in local papers, graffiti, and other non-standard ways of visualizing space. At their best, his maps challenge you to reconceptualize the world around you. The map below, simply entitled "Stars Map", is an attempt to situate Boylan Heights "in everything, that is, in the universe" according to Wood. I think there's something simple and evocative captured in the image, something I won't spoil with continued analysis. You can get a taste of some of Wood's other work here, and (as mentioned above) many of these maps have now been published.

Image by Denis Wood

The Octopus of Antwerp and Other Cold War Maps: Critical Cartographies I

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Life Magazine via Newberry Library

This is not the post I meant to write. My graduate research has increasingly involved reference to Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, a magisterial attempt to combine statistical data and cartography into an analysis of late-nineteenth century urban London experience. I had intended to post on Booth's groundbreaking "poverty maps", and the updated maps created by the London School of Economics (you can see their side-by-side comparison here). In my research for the post, though, I came across John Krygier's Making Maps blog, and I've become fascinated (and sidetracked) by the surprising power of cartography. Inspired to think about how maps and mapmaking critically constructs the world, what follows is a subjective and fairly non-rigorous tour of Western cartography during the Cold War era.

Take that oil-pump / octopus above, from January 26, 1953. The polemical intent is fairly obvious--as the Newberry website points out, the ostensible purpose of the map is to display the flow of goods from "independently-minded Western Europeans" behind the Iron Curtain. But the over-the-top representation of Antwerp as somehow both an organism and machine adds powerful ideological content. And the sheer clutter of stuff depicted on the map--food, oil and ships falling from the tentacles, clusters of spies, communist soldiers, and factories in Berlin--creates an sense of overwhelming profusion. The map inverts our expectations, crowding the Communist Bloc with Western goods while leaving the rest of Europe almost blank. It's a sublime example of Krygier and Wood's argument about the purpose of mapping.

Image: C' est ne pas le monde, Krygier and Wood

In "This is Not the World," a comic book-cum-manifesto, Krygier and Wood argue that far from neutrally or even ideally indexing or "representing" the world, maps are arguments, propositions about the organization of the world. This is the central axiom of critical cartography--that each map represents an explicit set of choices that add up to argumentation. Like any other text, then, maps are open to reading, porous, and require critical distance.

Image: Time Magazine via Newberry Library

Undoing traditional expectations, R. M. Chapin's map, made for Time's October 2, 1950 issue, positions the viewer's eyeline from just behind Moscow. As the Newberry Library notes, the "progressively diminishing color intensities on the map suggest" blood "seeping downhill" from the USSR. It effectively repositions the viewer's gaze and, in its delirious shift in perspective--east faces up on the map--provokes anxiety. "Reading" the map forces us to recognize the distortions, even as we appreciate the skill, utilized by the cartographer.

Image: Saturday Evening Post

The above map, from the Saturday Evening Post, March 23, 1963, depicts presumed radioactive fallout from a hypothetical enemy attack. The (recent) map below, designed by Richard Miller, shows actual radioactive fallout in the US, dispersed by wind patterns, from nuclear tests in the American Southwest 1951-1962. In this case the Defense Department's propaganda tool disguised as "public safety" bulletin eerily mirrors the elegant argument produced by 21st century environmental and liberal narratives. Miller, however, replaces the shades of crayon-scribbles of red with provacatively neutral black, creating a beautiful inkblot of radiation across the US.

Image: Richard Miller via Making Maps

Finally, two images from my new favorite cartographer (how many times in life does one get to say that?), William Bunge. The more I learn about Bunge the more interesting his life seems--pioneering cartographer, radical Marxist (later Stalinist), environmentalist, beloved teacher, anti-academic, and all-around provocateur. The interested are highly recommended to read an excellent blog post by Zachary Forest Johnson that includes a fairly thorough mini-biography and lots of images, here. The following two images need little more comment than Bunge provides. They come from his pioneering Nuclear War Atlas (1988), a book committed to demonstrating how geography could become "the queen of the peace sciences." As Forest Johnson notes, the book suffered from poor timing, coming out just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism in East Europe, but nonetheless its images are startlingly compact and elegant.

Image: William Bunge, Nuclear War Atlas, via Indiemaps

Though our society today faces radically different challenges than Bunge's late-Eighties western world, his conception of the liberating, peaceful power of geography remains essential. Especially as computers make cartography available to a much wider spectrum of users, understanding the critical power of maps becomes paramount. Next week I hope to examine how a few of Bunge's followers and admirers have taken up that task.

Mowgli's Brothers: The Jungle Books, Wild Children, and the Twentieth Century

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image:screenshot from volotov.com

“The first thing I want you to do,” Walt Disney is reported to have said to lead scriptwriter Larry Clemons upon giving him a copy of The Jungle Book, “is not read it.” Indeed. Not reading The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling’s 1894 collection of moral fables about Mowgli’s childhood among the animals and re-entry into human civilization, is a bit of a cottage industry. As one of the western world’s most famous feral children (alongside fellow turn-of-the-century literary peers Peter Pan and Tarzan), Mowgli has long been public property. But in the hundred-odd years since Mowgli, Baloo the Bear, and Shere Khan first entered our collective unconscious, the Jungle Books have embarked on their own odyssey that takes in everything from Imperialist allegory, Edwardian paramilitary organizations to Soviet science fiction and contemporary eco-criticism. And that’s just “The Bare Necessities.” All told, Mowgli’s adventures have taken him places Kipling—for all his fertile imagination—would never have dreamed, forming a kind of secret history of the twentieth century. In what follows, I try to quickly unpack some of that history through various images of Mowgli and The Jungle Book.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Mowgli first saw the light of day in various short stories published throughout 1893 and early 1894, collected in volume form later that year. Only three of the seven stories concern Mowgli (“Mowgli’s Brothers,” “Kaa’s Hunting,” and “Tiger, Tiger”) while the remainder of the volume is filled with other animal tales— the proto-environmental narrative of “The White Seal,” and the classic tale of bravery and duty, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” among others. Yet it was Mowgli’s ambivalent relationship to mankind, best expressed in “Tiger, Tiger,” as well as Kipling’s enunciation of “The Law of the Jungle” that caught early readers’ attention. With their portrayal of human society as deeply corrupt and their consequent valorization of Mowgli’s decision to “hunt alone,” the stories partake deeply of the degenerative cultural anxieties of their time (though oddly enough, Lockwood Kipling’s illustration above emphasizes Mowgli’s androgynous sexuality). Like all of Kipling’s imperial fictions, Mowgli works strangely—on the one hand, he clearly represents a kind of fetishized, animalistic native Other; but on the other, he surpasses human society. Closer to nature, he is also an idealized figure.

Image: http://www.scouting.milestones.btinternet.co.uk/cubs.htm

This was, of course, tailor-made for Robert Baden-Powell’s brief. Baden-Powell, alarmed by the early failures of the British military in the Boer War, famously founded the Boy Scouts as an attempt to reverse the degenerative tendencies of modern life. His foundational 1908 text Scouting for Boys had already incorporated the famous “memory game” from Kipling’s Kim; in 1916 Baden-Powell founded the Wolf Cubs as a junior arm of the Scouting organization. Its history, symbols, and motivations were drawn directly from, with Kipling’s approval, the Jungle Books. Even today the story “Mowgli’s Brothers,” now retitled “The Story of Akela and Mowgli,” appears in sections across the official Wolf and Bear Cub Scout Handbooks.

Further into the century, the Jungle Books were the subject of several major motion pictures, in particular Alexander Korda’s lavish, British Imperial spectacle from 1942 starring Sabu (whose film career particularly embodies the complexities of late colonial and post-colonial life for South Asians) and Disney’s famous 1967 version. The Korda version, made in the waning days of the British Empire in India to keep up morale on the home front, exemplifies the stirring, Orientalist fantasies the Korda brothers did so well--the film was a follow-up to the massive succes of The Thief of Baghdad (the poster for the 1942 film leads this post). As for the animated version, Walt Disney's quote makes clear that the text was merely a springboard for character development. That version would steamroll the ambiguities of Kipling’s tales into a narrative preparing young Mowgli for a productive life among human society (though at least it largely avoids the uncritical Orientalism of the 1994 live-action version, which also perversely failed to cast an actor of Indian descent in the lead role).

Image: www.realussr.com

More intriguing to me are a pair of Soviet adaptations of the work, the film-series Maugli [Adventures of Mowgli] (1967-71) and the science fiction novel Malysh [The Kid aka Space Mowgli] (1971). Maugli was released in five roughly twenty-minute sections, and, as the image above suggests, emphasizes heroic and epic themes. Unlike the Disney version, to which this series seems an ironic counterpart, the Soviet version remains fairly truthful to the stories. Apart from their emphasis on structuring masculine identity—an increasingly common theme in popular Soviet film and fiction during the post-Thaw years (and really, Kaa's positioning is none too subtle)–the Mowgli stories probably offered a veiled platform for discussion and critique of Western imperialism (the party line interpretation of French and American involvement in Vietnam). The full series is available here, though without subtitles.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii’s Malysh uses the Mowgli myth as a distant political allegory. In the far future, the first colonists of a distant world use the Kid—the teenaged survivor of a previous attempt to explore the planet—as a proxy to briefly attempt communication with the indigenous closed society of “Ark Megaforms” discovered living on the planet. The story ends, however, with the failure of the Ark Megaforms and humanity to communicate. The colonists depart, leaving the Kid behind, with only a transmitter as his link to human society. Here the Mowgli myth structures a deeply moving allegory of failure to communicate, in which the West (or is it the East) remains unable to penetrate and speak with the closed society of the East (or, again, is it the West)? These transformations of the Mowgli story seem ripe for further examination.

Image: dailymail.co.uk

Finally, British graffiti artist and all-around provocateur Banksy used the characters of The Jungle Book for his contribution to Greenpeace’s “Save or Delete?” exhibition in 2001. The controversial image of the Disney incarnations of the characters hooded and lined up for execution makes a vivid argument about environmental change. At the same time, I find it fascinating that the images seem to be invoked in a “non-colonial” environment. While the use of the Disney characters could be read as an argument implicating Disney’s corporate policies in environmental change—though I wouldn’t necessarily pursue that argument—there doesn’t seem to be a consciousness of colonial and racialist policies underlying the image. Is Bansky blind to those tensions in this piece, or does it seem to indicate that Mowgli’s origin as a product of colonial fantasy is obscured to 21^st century viewers? Whatever the case, the ecological underpinnings of Banksy’s image suggests the ways the Mowgli myth continues to impact audiences in new and provocative ways, some hundred years after his first appearance.

Charles Dickens, Graphic Novelist: Adapting Great Expectations

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Original cover art for Illustrated Classics Acclaim Edition by Chuck Wojtkiewicz

Image: sonicdan.com

Quick—how do you sell kids on a hundred-and-fifty-year old novel that’s about (among other things) a middle-aged man’s pained reflections on class identity and snobbery, confrontational gender politics, and criminal law reform? If you answered, “Why, turn it into a comic book, of course,” congratulations—you may go to the head of the class. Great Expectations seems the most unlikely of Dickens’s novels to create in comic book form—in fact, it’s one of only two novels Dickens did not commission illustrations for, suggesting that even the Inimitable was skeptical of its visual appeal (Hard Times is the other). Yet comic book versions of the text have flourished since the 1940’s. To join in the early celebrations of Charles Dickens’s bicentennial (and in honor of yet another film adaptation), this week I’d like to discuss some images in the book’s transformation from adult novel to children’s text.

Full disclosure: I’m a would-be Dickens scholar, as well as a long-term Dickens fan, but the inherent popularity of Great Expectations continues to surprise me—it was once again voted readers’ favorite over at The Guardian. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the novel isn’t fantastic, and despite my theoretical summary above, full of action, what with all the convicts, evil doubles, cracked old women, sinister lawyers, and femme fatales stuffed into the plot. But it’s also a mellow slice of late Dickens, and Pip’s outrage and embarrassment over his youthful behavior is a hard sell for most teens forced to read it in school (what fourteen-year-old cares about their priggishness?). The nightmarishly carnivalesque street-life of Oliver Twist or the turns of luminescent comedy and tear-jerking melodrama in David Copperfield I find (and found) far more congenial avenues into Dickens’s work.

Of course I say that, but Great Expectations was the first Dickens novel I read, probably around six or seven, in the edition below:

Image: mycomicshop.com

The low-rent gnarliness of that cover has stayed with me a long time. It’s a splendid gothic scene that’s reminiscent of those great EC Comics covers from the 1950’s with the lurid greens and blues against the mouldering gray of the cemetery. The lifeless colors of the outside world focus the attention on terrified child and his attacker. The suggestion of sexualized violence is a bit weird considering the target audience of these books was boys from 8-13, though there are traces of sexual violence all over the story. (I wonder if Peter Carey, whose version of the novel, Jack Maggs, makes good but explicit use of male-male sexual practices, ever stumbled upon this cover?) All the same, the cover certainly piqued my juvenile interest and provided my first taste of one of the great, if not the greatest, novelists of all time.

Image: comicbitsonline.com

Image: robot6.comicbookresources.com

This first encounter between Magwitch and Pip has proven to be a durable entry point for illustrators of the novel (in whatever version). It makes perfect sense, as it entices younger readers to find out what’s going on in the text without alienating older audiences. Above, both the British Classical Comics graphic novel and the Penguin Deluxe Edition have chosen to feature it. I quite like the way that the Penguin, in otherwise a quite nice reprint of the full novel, emphasizes the comic-strip nature of the scene through paneling and word bubbles; something that the other versions—most of them actual comic books—don’t do. There are ironies to market production….

Image: mycomicshop.com

The original 1945 Classics Illustrated cover, featured above, provides probably the most strongly gendered cover I’ve seen, as two ragged-but-manly men struggle in the mud, a far cry from the desperate starving Magwitch and Compeyson of the text. I do like how the margins of the cover are also enticingly filled with potentially violent figures: on the right, a somewhat crazy-eyed soldier with gun in hand; on the left, gentle Joe swings his blacksmith’s hammer with a bit of bloodlust on his face. What right-thinking boy—be he British or American—could resist such strong appeals to his masculinity?

Image: classicscentral.com

I’d like to conclude, though, by looking at two less-gendered but perhaps more strange images. Above is the Greek cover for the Classics Illustrated edition, which features an obviously post-inheritance Pip (notice the classy bow tie) whispering conspiratorially into Miss Havisham’s ear. Without dramatizing a specific scene in the novel (at least not one I can identify at the moment—any thoughts, fellow Dickensians?) this strange image manages to nail the gothic circulation of secrets in the novel. There’s a cumulative and weird power to it, with its literalization of wealth in the form of treasure and the sinister looks on the faces of Miss Havisham and Pip. By making Pip, even unintentionally, look like a villain, this image captures in a seemingly offhand way the complex narratorial work of the novel in which Pip is one of the villains of the text: the polite country boy turned decadent prig.

Finally, the haunting image this post leads with captures the gothic strands of the text. Miss Havisham’s face is distorted mask, as much animal rage as human skull. Estella’s central positioning as the object of Pip’s gaze, as well as our own, duplicates her role in the text. Her look of disdain and barely-controlled anger quickly reveals the nature of this love triangle (and the obvious pleasure the artist has taken in making her look so beautiful and nasty—probably unintentionally—replicates the real misogyny in the text). Behind everyone looms the shadow of Magwitch, whose life is intricately bound together with all these characters, though we don’t know it. But what I like best is the depiction of Pip, a faceless screen for the reader. After all, he is a sort of everyboy, and this image encourages to identify with him and to become him, just as the text of the novel also encourages that identification. Brilliantly reflecting the depths of the novel as well as its surface, this image suggests that, after all, Great Expectations’ surprising visual popularity is warranted.

Imagining the 99%: Occupy Austin's (Visual) Self-Representation

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Screenshot from occupyaustin.org

If you couldn't tell from the past few days of viz.'s coverage, the Occupy Austin protests continue, if attendance has mildly abated from this weekend's high. This blog is not an appropriate venue for the discussion of the movement’s goals (you can find more intelligent discussion about Austin’s own version of the movement here and here). However, I am interested in the ways in which the Occupy Austin movement represents its constituents. The Occupy Wall Street / Austin brief—which aspires to represent 99% of the American (some Austin material intransigently claims “world”) populace—faces a particularly clear set of representational challenges even as social networking allows its images to proliferate in ways unimaginable even five years ago. For the rest of this post, I’ll highlight some images from Occupy Austin’s affiliated website.

One of the ways—particularly prominent on the Occupy Austin website—is to simply erase personal identity and to focus on a paramount tool of protest: the megaphone.

Images: occupyaustin.org

The megaphone, of course, literalizes the protest’s desire to make voice audible: “Come and make your voice heard” is a central talking point in various posters and placards the local movement has authorized. At their best, these kinds of images have an extraordinary symbolic power in the clean graphic design. The ideologically potent red star manages to be central to the design without being the eye’s resting point, slipping in without emphasis an inherent socialist claim (it’s worth noting that the red star doesn’t appear on any direct content on the Occupy Wall Street page that I had a chance to view).

Less successful may be the image this post leads with, which is also the main graphic on the Occupy Austin homepage. While replacing the protester’s head with a megaphone conveys the desire to be heard that’s at the center of these protests, I wonder if the substitution of a bullhorn for a brain is necessarily desirable (of course, subbing in a megaphone also allows the designers to sidestep questions of identity politics).

Image: occupyaustin.org

And then there's this image, which cleverly transforms the megaphone into what appears to be an appendage being crushed in a handshake. Graphically the poster is relatively impeccable in the way it quotes the visual motif of the other posters while subjecting it to a transformation. Symbolically, though? While it's hardly an act of despicable violence, it seems at odds with the general tone of peaceful civil disobedience cultivated by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I always feel the end of a post is a good time to come clean, ideologically. I stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Its idealism, and even its pluralistic free-form ideological naivete, are really refreshing to me in a time when being a liberal and a leftist has seemed to be all talk and not much action. The academic in me wants to praise the movement's embrace, whether conscious or not, of a flowing, Deleuzian rhizomatics. But the praxis-oriented person in me wonders how long the movement will be able to avoid significant political and social splits and fissures. Two final examples to illustrate that:

Screenshots from occupyaustin.org

As these images make clear, for the moment that fist of solidarity can find a rapport between the stark brutality of the right hand images color-inverted fist and the eco-aware, pastoral, post-hippie consciousness of the left hand poster. But how long can these positions hang in together? The one poster is pre-dirtied, smudged with toner ink, and hand-markered. It's a callout to political propaganda the world over, as well as invested in a specific hardcore aesthetics. It's definitively urban, and it seems invested in overthrow. The other image is twilight-blue, with a heartbeat center of consciousness in the clenched fist. The Texas cornflowers have peace signs within the petals. It's expansivist, and it wants you to belong: "We are the ones," it proclaims. Fair enough. But for how long can these "ones" be the same?

Visualizing Censorship II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Partial Screen shot from Google Maps

How do you make a topic like censorship visible? After all, the goal of censorship is to make things, in a literal sense, invisible, un-seeable. But in a world where (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes insidiously) the visual has come to be paramount, how can you visualize censorship, see what can’t be seen? A few weeks ago, I posted about a few of the visual images highlighted by the Harry Ransom Center’s new Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit related to this topic. Inspired by Banned Books Week—it’s this week, in case you didn’t know—I want to examine some modern representations of censorship.

First up is a project originated by Chris Peterson of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Alita Edelman of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, “Mapping Censorship”. As viz.’s own Lisa Gulessarian noted last week, Google Maps has been instrumental in helping us reorganize our relationships to the real world, and the “Mapping Censorship” project—now maintained by the American Library Association (ALA)—makes visible what can seem all-too-theoretical.

The project is simple: the ALA marks the location and records the details of book ban or challenge in the US from 2007 on. A flag on a map indicates a challenge, sometimes of multiple texts. I should note that the map is incomplete: the ALA records all challenges reported, but estimates that those challenges are possibly less than a quarter of all incidents nationwide, as the majority of challenges are never reported. Nonetheless, there’s an astonishing amount of information available, as each flag will provide you with a summary of the challenge and, in some cases, take you to further resources: blog entries, letters from concerned parties, and so on. Even without that additional content, the map makes an elegant ideological point—we’re a country awash in censorship.

Image: Screenshot from Flicker

While “Mapping Censorship” makes censorship visible geographically, this banner—constructed by the staff of the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, OH—constructs its appeals ideologically. And while it’s nothing new to lay claim to the American flag in quest of public support, I can’t help but find this image impressive. The books are 99 of the 100 most-challenged books from 1990-2000 (the missing book is Daniel Cohen’s Curses, Hexes, and Spells from 1974, a fondly remembered childhood classic). There’s a certain power in being able to see the texts in question (you can find a larger version of the image here). While some of the choices are unsurprising—The Anarchist Cookbook, Madonna’s Sex—others seem idiosyncratic, at best: Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik series? Where’s Waldo?? Plus, the Banned Books Week Banner makes for a fine game of Banned Book one-upsmanship, as you can challenge your friends to find out who has read more books from the list (I come in at a solid fifty-one, if you’re interested).

The point being made by these images is that censorship can easily be dismissed, as its nature is to be invisible, to be registered, if at all, only as a gap in experience. Visual rhetoric is a powerful tool in reclaiming and making visible that practice. Those who wish to ban books understand the power of visual images and language to articulate alternative viewpoints. Those who oppose censorship need images like these to keep that struggle out in the open. While all this sounds somewhat unavoidably leftist (and, full disclosure, I am), I don't want to make it out that censorship is the result of some kind of massive government conspiracy. It's not (usually). The vast majority of books are challenged by parents (good parents, even): parents who read to their children, who encourage a love of books, parents who value how important reading is as a cultural and personal act. That's why it's all the more important that we discuss--critically and out in the open--what kinds of viewpoints we can tolerate and represent. In that debate, we discover who we are (as a person, public, and nation). These images make a good start.

Visualizing Censorship: Seals, Symbols, and the Visual Rhetoric of Vice

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Photo by Jake Ptacek

We here at viz are deeply excited about our new partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, one of the premier research libraries for the humanities in the United States. As part of that partnership, we’ve been given a tour of their current exhibitions and the chance to blog about some of the Center’s amazing holdings. You may have already had a chance to read Matthew Reilly’s meditation on their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit and Jay Voss’s post on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition. Continuing that thread, this week I want to look more closely at two artifacts on display in the BBSC exhibit: the official seals for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

I won’t rehash the history of either institution too much—something the Center exhibit does more thoroughly and forcefully than I can do here—but I am fascinated by the differing visual appeals of each seal. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (or NYSSV--sorry there’s no less ungainly acronym) seal creates a tiny narrative. In the left portion of the seal, an official-looking jailer pushes a young man through what must be one of the thickest doors in New York, into the darkness beyond. On the other half, a well-dressed gentleman tosses books onto a blazing fire—and it’s hard not to see a self-satisfied smirk on his face. The seal is a brilliant bit of propaganda. By representing the two acts in the same space, it posits a connection. They become two sides of the same coin. Never mind, of course, that the images are discontinuous—there’s no explanation as to what the criminal has to do with the books being tossed into the fire. Once you’ve seen the image, it’s virtually impossible to unsee the connection, to separate out the different narratives on a gut level.

I should add here that the narrative inscribed on the NYSSV’s seal is far from theoretical. Though technically a private endeavor—it originated through founder Anthony Comstock’s contacts in the YMCA—the NYSSV was chartered by the New York state legislature. Its members had the legal power to raid bookstores, seize material, and make arrests. Under Comstock’s successor, John S. Sumner, the NYSSV raided dozens of bookstores, impounded untold numbers of books, and prosecuted (or attempted to prosecute) dozens of novels and magazines, ranging from Ulysses to Real Forbidden Sweets. The seal was no idle threat, but a history: real people went to prison, and real books were burned, in the name of public morality.

There’s one final irony to the NYSSV’s seal. Perhaps it’s unintentional, or perhaps it’s the “lefty” politics in me looking for evidence of some Orwellian dystopia, but I wonder: when it’s read in the standard left-to-right way of to Western readers, the seal begins with an imprisonment before it gets to the “suppression of vice” (i.e the book burning). In other words, you go first, and the books after you. It’s a warning to everyone that what you read might not even be marked out yet as dangerous. A vicious book might be defined, not by its effect on you, but by your effect on it. There's a looking-glass mentality at work here which upsets the traditional narrative of a book's influence ("vicious books make bad citizens"). Instead, the seal seems to suggest that "bad citizens read bad books;" sadly, this would not be the last time that 20th century politics would rewrite cultural narratives.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

The New England Watch and Ward Society’s seal is—let’s face it—cooler. A hand throttles the snake coiled around it beneath the legend, “Manu Fortis”—“With a strong hand.” The symbolism is startling and direct, with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. While the NYSSV felt the need to narrativize and to demonstrate the effects of vice, the Watch and Ward Society—even the name is less linear—creates an iconography of power. The snake, with all its biblical associations intact, has fangs extended, ready to strike. Only a powerful (and, needless to say, masculine) hand can protect all the innocents who undoubtedly crouch just outside the frame of the seal. And it’s worth mentioning again, that hand isn’t just holding the snake, it’s crushing it. The seal makes a brilliantly simple, if disturbingly violent, claim to power.

A kind of sister organization to the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward Society was based out of Boston, where membership was largely composed of the “Brahmin aristocracy” (membership was only available to men). Unlike the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward society had no actual legal authority to impound books or make arrests; they relied on legal protest and challenges to ban books. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their seal is more cannily metaphorical (and perhaps a slight case of over-compensation for their legal impotence). The Watch and Ward Society was no less effective, though: the phrase “banned in Boston” has entered the lexicon thanks to their efforts.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

As the poster above demonstrates, the visual rhetoric of book censorship had to change dramatically after the Nazi Party began putting into action on a state-implemented level what had previously been only the wildest fantasy of book censors (though I personally deplore the actions of the NYSSV and the Watch and Ward Society, the calibrations of their acts are, of course, far different than those of the Nazi Party). No longer could smiling book burners be depicted on state-supported seals, and the inherent claims of the Watch and Ward Society’s seal needed to be re-evaluated in a society that had witnessed the liquidation of personal freedoms and identity on a previously unimaginable scale. Ironically, this visual image itself comes from Boston, where the Boston Public Library emerged as quiet defenders of freedom of publication.

Both Societies struggled to survive in a post-WWII society. The NYSSV changed its name to the Society to Maintain Public Decency in 1947, and quietly dissolved after the retirement of Sumner, whose charisma had kept the Society afloat through a series of legal defeats. In 1948 the new head of the Watch and Ward Society, Dwight Spaulding, redirected its focus towards gambling and other social issues. Today, after several mergers and filiations, the Society’s endowments are part of the much different Community Resources for Justice group, which works to promote prison reform and ex-convicts’ rights.

Censorship, of course, hasn’t gone away, and new media fields—film, various iterations of popular music, video games—continue, along with books, to be targeted as corrupting influences on America’s youth. The act of censorship itself, though, has largely become a local issue, which tends to hide its prevalence, except in certain high-profile cases. It seems unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) that any American group will so dramatically visualize censorship as iconically and dramatically as these two. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the obvious?

Abraham Lincoln is Watching Over You: The Strange World of Victorian Spirit Photography

Jake Ptacek — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:28:25 +0000

For my first viz. post ever, I thought I’d take a look at the Victorian phenomenon of spirit photography. Truly timely, right? But in the wake of Errol Morris’s new book on photography, Believing is Seeing, which is concerned with sussing out the relationship between objective truth and the photograph, thinking about this mid-Victorian malarkey suddenly seems more culturally relevant to me than it did, say, a week ago. After all, the controversy over spirit photographs represents the first serious sustained debate about photography’s truth-telling powers. But more importantly, spirit photography remains, if you’ll pardon the obvious pun, visually haunting: at its most basic rhetorical level, its wish-fulfilling nature provides access to powerful cultural fantasies. Read more after the break.

Probably the single most (in)famous spirit photographer, William Mumler is a prime example of sheer American hucksterism. Born in 1832, he worked as a jewel engraver until 1861, when “spirits” began appearing in Mumler’s amateur photographs. Capitalizing on the nascent rage for Spiritualism and a powerful sentimentality engendered by the mass casualties of the American Civil War, Mumler set up shop as the nation’s chief spirit photographer. Mumler’s career skyrocketed until 1869, when a trial for fraud, initiated in New York City, made him notorious. One of the events of the season, Mumler’s trial represents a key moment in the history of photography, as for the first time the medium’s relationship to truth was being brought into the legal arena. The trial saw P. T. Barnum testify against Mumler, where Barnum (prophetically?) circulated a photograph of himself with the blurry head of Abraham Lincoln in the background as evidence that spirit photographs could be faked. Though William Mumler was found not guilty, the trial effectively ended the first portion of his career. After 1869, Mumler continued to circulate spirit photographs—including some of his most famous—but biographical information becomes much more scarce.[1]

William Mumler’s most famous spirit photograph, shown above, captures a beatific, almost Christ-like Abraham Lincoln resting his transparent hands on the shoulders of Mary Todd Lincoln (harder to discern in all digital copies I’ve examined is the faint presence of Thaddeus Lincoln in the upper left-hand corner). Mumler claims in his autobiography not to have known the subject was Mary Todd Lincoln—though he had previously photographed her (without spirits) in 1865—but instead thought she was a “Mrs. Lindall.” His surprise when he learned the “true” identity of his illustrious sitters may be imagined. Though even by Mumler’s standards the 1872 photograph isn’t a particularly convincing piece of work—Lincoln’s head seems strangely posed and stiff—it’s an audacious piece of mythmaking. The photograph collapses the distinction between the national and the familial. Mary Todd Lincoln, still dressed in black, still mourning her loss, stares out directly at the viewer, not challengingly, but with the beginning of a smile. Behind her the iconic face of Lincoln looks downward, evading the viewer’s gaze, but he is smiling. The viewer is encouraged to identify with Mary Todd—the grieving survivor—as she comes to realize a sense of security and protection in the ghostly hands of the great American myth, Abraham Lincoln.

Not every spirit photographer was—or could be—as audacious as Mumler, yet all spirit photographs work by fulfilling a complicated set of desires. On a personal level, they allow their subjects one more chance to see, whether in a cloudy mist or transparent blotch, loved ones thought gone. Edouard Buguet, a Parisian spirit photographer, confessed during his trial to a number of fraudulent practices. Yet, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his excellent 2006 book, Faces of the Living Dead, “witness after witness—journalist, photographic expert, musician, merchant, man of letters, optician, ex-professor of history, and colonel of artillery—came forward to testify in his defense…. One after another they left the witness box protesting that they chose to believe the evidence of their own eyes, rather than Buguet’s confession.” There’s something deeper at work here than a basic fear of being exposed as a “gullible dupe,” as Jolly puts it, though that’s a part of it, of course.

Spirit photographs touch on matters of serious belief. They provide seemingly objective proof that identity continues on after death in a reassuring, even comforting form. These aren’t generic ghosts or tormented souls—these are people we can identify: family members, departed lovers, former schoolteachers, or even, as above, old assistants. The desire to recognize is paramount in spirit photography. Buguet testified that many of his frauds relied on dummies with false beards or studio assistants wearing drapes, with a collection of 300 or so heads that could be swapped out and exposed onto the plates. Yet his clients would identify the same head as different people: “the mother of one sitter, the sister of a second, and the friend of a third” (Jolly 22). Along with the ability to be recognized, the spirits in these photographs share another common trait—they are frequently quotidian. Though they sometimes appear swathed and veiled in drapery, often they show up in normal dress. Perhaps they look at us, or at the sitter, or rest hands or arms on them. But mostly they just seem to be around, hanging out on the margins of our experience. Rather than being upsetting, the most powerful spirit photographs suggest that there’s no break or discontinuity between the reality the living experience and that which the dead experience. We go on, even if life doesn’t.

Of course there’s an incredible comfort in this idea, especially for Western audiences after the 1850’s—and spirit photography seems to be almost entirely a phenomenon of France, Great Britain, and America. Decimated by war, famine, and social upheaval, while simultaneously undergoing the first serious pangs of religious doubt, early spirit photography promised the West that modernity didn’t have to be as unsettling as it seemed. Underlying the phenomenon of spirit photography is a persistent faith in technology. It’s a weird paradox: on the one hand, spirit photographs act as a “Take that!” to materialists, confirming the existence of an unseen spiritual existence; on the other, the photographs strengthen the claims of technology to impartially and fully document material reality.

Today, of course, it seems naïve to put so much faith into the photograph, which we now know is an infinitely manipulable medium. Except, of course, that we still do. The recent success of Paranormal Activity and its sequel—a third is on the way this October—only caps a decade which saw a return to a belief in photography and film as central media for the inscription and dispersal of “spirit.” Films like The Ring series and White Noise, the increased interest in “electronic voice phenomena” (EVP), and (pseudo)scientific television programs like the History Channel’s MonsterQuest and MysteryQuest, all point to a continued cultural fascination with the possibilities of visual “proof” of continued, non-corporeal existence. (That all the examples I’ve cited construct that existence negatively, as something malevolent or horrifying—very much unlike spirit photography—you may discuss amongst yourselves….) The ghosts in the machine, it seems, are very much still among us.