Nate Kreuter's blog

Viz. Founder Has New Blog

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:36:01 +0000

Dear Viz. Readers,

Four years ago John Jones, Tim Turner, and Vessela Valiavistcharska and I founded Viz. We couldn't be happier for the recent Lovas weblog award that Kairos bestowed upon Viz. I will remain sporadically active with Viz., but I am also happy to unveil 3 x 3 in Cullowhee, my new blog about tranitioning from the life of a grad student to the life of an assistant professor. Please check it out and add it to your RSS readers. I am still working on the static content, so keep checking back.

Cheers,

Nate

Stick People Attempt to Engage in Rationality with the TSA

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:37:01 +0000

From the web comic XKCD:

Iranian Nuclear Facility Photo & Interpretation

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:30:08 +0000

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine. The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran.

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq. I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us.

The United states of Nations: a juxtapositional reading

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:15:48 +0000

Image credit: James Richards, via Strange Maps

The dark corners of the intertubes are populated by weirdly animated detritus. In one particular corner I found Strange Maps, an intellectual terra incognita. Here is one map from the site, in which map-author and vexillologist James Richards has filled in United States states with the flags of other nations with populations equal to that of the correlate United States state. What is the point of such a map? It takes us nowhere. It is trivia, contrived comparison, meaningless. Indeed.

This *is* an odd land, and there is perhaps no better way to understand, as a stranger in a strange land, the strangeness than that quintessentially American experience and myth, the road trip. "Buy the ticket, take the ride," someone screams in Jack's ear as he discreetly tries to fill in his fantasy baseball roster.

In the Lonestar People's Republic of North Texorea . . . imagine it . . .

The high plains meth labs have been bulldozed. Justice remains swift. And decisive. The governor's call to secession has been fulfilled. President Rick Perry, in his paramilitary uniform of high commander, sings along to the Lonestar Republic's national anthem and reviews the People's Army, parading forth from Camp Mabry and into the Austin city streets. "Keep Austin Weird," the buzz-cut forces shout in unison as they pass the review stand. The death penalty endures, but the process has been expedited. The workaday Texicans have traded in their Pearl for Pulrosul (an alcoholic concoction bottled with a dead adder inside), and good ol' boys, no longer satisfied with whiskey and rye, swill the juice of the alcohol addled adders, and later bite their heads off. The mezcal worm has turned, into a snake. Our trip begins just out of reach of the center of State power in Austin, on Interstate 35. We drive north. "Keep the Weird in Austin."

The border crossing between North Korean Texas and Oklahoman Moldova is awkward, because our papers are not in order. Not wanting to allow the authorities of either nation state time to catch on, we speed further north. The Choctaw remain dispossessed, but the casinos still operate at full tilt.

Kansas, no longer safe harbor for Fred Phelps and his lolly-pop guild army of Westboro Baptist Church, is New Jamaica. One of the whitest states in the Union now caters to the cliches of Island tourist expectations. Bleached, Wonderbread whitened reggae is the new elevator music, and the tourists converge. But all is not well as Jimmy Cliff spins in his grave on the grain-fatted plain. "There's no place like home" and this ain't no island in the Caribbean, Dorothy. Home is not here. We can't flycast for bonefish in the New Jamaica. Definitely not home.

We spin across Nicaraguan Missouri. The Royals and Cardinals play futbol now. Jack is disappointed. We take in a few games, but the rioting is intolerable. A Pole is calling it the second soccer war. Back into the car. George Brett is not pleased, but he stays behind in Kansas City, and remains irregular. Or too regular.

Still bearing up I-35, we travel over the rich loam of Albanian Iowa. The border crossing is smooth here. There are no communists in sight at this crossing. The guards shake hands with each other and trade exotic brands of cigarettes. We turn a hard right on I-80 in Des Moines, which, because the Albanians are just happy to be here and the Iowans are such hospitable hosts, has been allowed to keep its neutrally French name.

East on I-80, and Illinois has become Zambian Illinois, not Kenyan Illinois, and right-wing conspiracy theorists continue to question the natal origins of President Obama.

In Paraguayan Indiana, Andes have sprung from the farms.

"Greek" Ohio is a wasteland. These are the wrong Greeks, frat boys. We don't stop, not for gas or even a quick piss.

We detour briefly into Guinea Michigan, and Detroit---the ~~metaphorical~~ literal coal fired asshole of American industry---has been replaced by the similarly coastal city of Conakry, population 1,857,153, and falling. There was never any auto industry here, just an unnecessarily malarial West African metropolis, population falling.

In Penn-Zimbabwe we turn south, off of I-80 finally and onto I-99, which brings us to State College and Penn State University, where "We are?!" is now met with resounding answers of "Zimbabwe!" when the call-and-response is initiated at random.

Back in North Korean Texas, immigration issues no longer rate, and across the Rio Grande Valley the Mexican nationalists are discussing the idea of a Great Wall to keep the riff-raff out.

Images like the map Richards has created have little immediate meaning, besides perhaps for the referential relationships they invite us to recognize or invent. Perhaps we do need the captions?

But this is all just silly, right? A silly series of comparisons, and rambling at that, invited by a silly image. Such comparison could not tell us much, or at least not much that is meaningful, about our more real world. Perhaps:

Kim Jong Il

Texas Governor Rick Perry

Texas Flag

North Korean Flag

Tunnel Under US/Mexico Border

Tunnel Under South Korea/North Korea Border

NEW: Creative Commons Visual Rhetoric Introduction

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:32:01 +0000

Check our new Creative Commons Introduction to Visual Rhetoric in the "assignments" section.

Interview with Jan Eliot, Creator of Stone Soup, New in "Views" Section

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:01:10 +0000

A new interview has been posted the the views section. Viz. contributor Sarah Wagner interviews Jan Eliot, the creator of Stone Soup. Read it here .

LIFE releases previously unreleased photos of MLK from the day of his assassination

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:19:22 +0000

Recently LIFE magazine released previously unreleased photos of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the day of his assassination. I'm not sure how that works, since LIFE is a now defunct publication, but it may have something to do with their parent company, who surely still exists in some form or another.

It's interesting to think how much the photos of that day that were previously released inform our memory of it (and I use the word "memory" very loosely, since that was well before I was born).

*I haven't posted an image here simply because LIFE, or whoever their parent company is, is probably the kind of company that would sue our poor asses, even though the use would clearly be under the provisions of fair use. I'm wary, especially after the RIAA came after one of our instructors a couple years ago when I student used a clip from a song in a student project that ended up online, which was hosted on the instructor's website. I feel my paranoia is well founded.

Fish Porn

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:50:23 +0000

I am a desperately addicted fly fisherman, (click here to see my favorite fly fishing blog, Sexyloops) and I recently took note of the pornographic qualities of a genre of angling pictures. In an era of catch-and-release fishing it's customary for fishermen and fisherwomen to pose for impressive shots with their catches before returning their catch (hopefully) safely to the water. Consider this typical example:

Yes, I went out of my way to find an example of "fish porn" with a mustache in the frame, guilty. I'm also not the first to notice the fish porn genre.

I've begun to think of these images as "fish porn" because they present, like other forms of pornography, often unrealistic ideals, and in anglers, they produce physiological responses of lust and anticipation. I'm not condemning the images, but it's an odd correlation in my mind. I am sometimes repulsed by the images at times. I know they're just keepsakes, reminders of a fishing trip, but sometime there is a trophy quality in the images that makes me uncomfortable.

In response, here is an example of my own fly fishing anti-porn, the smallest trout I have ever caught on a fly, a small brook trout from a secret stream in Virginia:

New Interview Posted -- Roberto Tejada

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:24:13 +0000

A new interview has been posted to our views section. Viz. contributor Dale Smith speaks with author Roberto Tejada about Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography.

Roberto Tejada is a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Mirrors for Gold and National Camera, as well as a founder of the periodical Mandorla.

Check out the interview.

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/files/tejada.jpg alt="sexist helvetica ad" class="center" width="180">

Are some protest images too graphic?

Nate Kreuter — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:22:34 +0000

*Today's post is more of a question, and rather than reproduce the images of the discussion, I will write about them.

Today I witnessed what is an annual event at the University of Texas at Austin. An anti-abortion protest group was set up outside of Gregory Gym. Set up behind them were 30 foot tall billboards, a traveling road show of graphic photos that the group claims depict aborted fetuses. The appeal of the photos is obvious, an attempt to ask, "how can people kill tinier people." Note that the photos these groups use (and there are many such groups that hold similar protests at campuses around the country) are not necessarily depicting the same medical circumstances that the groups claim the photos depict.

What was interesting is that this event appears to have taken place under some guise of university sanction. University of Texas police were providing security, and the billboards were protected by barricades obviously owned by the University of Texas. Such marks of officialdom lead me to believe that the protest had to have been organized through some university sanctioned student group, presumably with a faculty sponsor. Obviously the University's allowing the event does not equal an endorsement of the group's message, but they certainly weren't trespassing.

As a colleague and I walked out of the gym, he asked an intriguing question, "I wonder what would happen if someone launched a similar protest with equally graphic images of dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians?"

I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm captivated by it and its ramifications. What if a similar student group, operating through the same channels and meeting the same bureaucratic requirements, launched an anti-war protest graphically depicted some of the 4,000+ Americans who have been lost?

I don't know how UT would respond to such an event, but it would be explosive. How would your academic institution react?

*I have not included relevant images in this, our visual rhetoric blog, as a personal decision not to reproduce images that I feel inhibit, rather than enabling, civil debate.*

New Permanent Content Section at viz.

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:30:18 +0000

We at viz. are happy to announce the launch of our "views" section, in which we will post interviews with prominent scholars in the field. Our initial post is an interview with Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, the authors of No Caption Needed. Check back for additional content in the coming weeks.

Cartooning Obama

Nate Kreuter — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:19:43 +0000

Right off the bat, I want to say that I'm not accusing contemporary political cartoonists of creating racist depictions of Barack Obama. But I do wonder, is that tough to avoid? Political cartoons typically accentuate the subject's features in unflattering ways. They're caricatures. Remember George W. Bush's enlarged ears? The problem is that, with the nation's first African-American President, cartoonists have to avoid a whole history of racist cartooning. They have to simultaneously do what they've always done, which is make fun of the most powerful person in the world, but without referencing a racist visual history.

Consider this racist cartoon:

(Image from the Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum)

That's probably a scary referent to have in the cartoon history books if you're an editorial cartoonist working today. I'd be curious to hear what others have noticed on this dilemma, but it seems to me that most cartoonists are simply emphasizing Obama's skinniness and height, so as to avoid any of the racist references. But then there are some cartoons, like this one, that seem to be flirting with the historical racist images:

Remote Sensing and the Obama Inauguration

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:35:03 +0000

Much was made of the crowds that attended President Obama's inauguration in Washington, DC last week.

As evidence of remote sensing's (that is, satellite image's) greater role in public consciousness, check out this image of the crowds gathered for the historic moment, shot at one-half meter resolution. (One-half, or.5, meter resolution means, more or less, that the smallest units discernible in the image are .5 x .5 meters, about the size of a person from above. The resolution is roughly equivalent on the NIIRS scale, which is the military/intelligence community's rating scale for remotely sensed image interpretability.)

Increasingly news organizations are citing remotely sensed images in their reporting. Whether this is a techno-fad or provides a legitimately new and informative perspective on events, I'd be curious to hear readers' opinions on.

Image courtesy of GeoEye (click link for a larger resolution photo, as well as additional remotely sensed images)

Announcement: New Section on Viz.

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:43:11 +0000

We are happy to announce that Viz. will be adding a new category of content to its permanent content area in the very near future. We will be unveiling an "(re/interview" section in which we will have transcripts of interviews with prominent visual rhetoric/communication scholars, as well of reviews of some of their work. Our kick-off of the section will be an interview with Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, the authors of the book and blog "No Caption Needed." Check back in a week or two for the new section and the re/interview, which we will announce on the blog as well.

The Bite of Coffee

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:50:46 +0000

The Copyranter, a blogger I'm becoming more and more of a fan of, recently posted these images from an Italian ad campaign for stove-top coffee makers. The title of the ads, or the slogan paired with them is, "the bite of coffee."

I'm not sure I want to drink coffee with a bite strong enough to remind me of a scorpion or spider, and the slogan seems a bit, well, forced or something. But, I do find the images really intriguing. They're weird for one, but something about the dark coffee bean creatures against the model's pale skin and bright red lips sets up a contrasts that I find aesthetically very pleasing.

At any rate, the images are a good example of just how far some ad campaigns reach in their attempts to grab our attention. And Copyranter's blog is well worth checking out, though it may at times be a bit too irreverent/borderline crude for some. That's what I like about the blog though.

Referencing Hieroglyphics

Nate Kreuter — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:46:18 +0000

A UT Information Science student, Will Martin, has come up with what I think is an ingenious way to reference glyphs. Will uses a tag cloud to associate words with the pictures in the glyphs. So, if you're trying to find out what a glyph with, say, an alligator in it means, you simply visit Will's tag cloud and click on "alligator," at which point all the glyphs containing alligators will show up. This seems to me like a really useful and intuitive way to use our alphabetic system to reference a glyphic system, like the Egyptian one here, when the user is unfamiliar with the glyphic system at hand.

Check out Will's site, which is still under construction. I think you'll find it fascinating. And because users can add tags to images, I think the site will become even more useful over time as it is continually refined by users' collective intelligence.

Making the Best out of Your Hook Hand When Running for Senate

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:57:29 +0000

In Oregon, one of the 49 states that I am not from, Democratic Senate candidate Steve Novick has released a few campaign ads that cleverly play on two of his attributes that might otherwise be construed as weaknesses, his 4'9" height and his prosthetic hand. A friend forwarded me a link to a Huffington Post blog entry about the ads. I have embedded the actual ads below.

I like to use short videos like these in my rhetoric class to get students talking about basic rhetorical principles, such as how a person develops a particular ethos, and what the ramifications of that ethos might be for various artists.

Getting the Most Out of Your Graffiti (and the first bounty offered on our blog)

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:37:05 +0000

I've always thought that the best graffiti is on train cars. Maybe it's not always the best graphically, but I like the statement--not only has the tagger tagged, but the canvas is mobile and likely to get pulled all over the country, set forth into the world. It's bold. Not as bold as the graffiti on interstate signs where some kid crawled out on a metal pole over 80 mile-an-hour traffic, but bold nonetheless.

On the other hand, I've always looked down my nose at graffiti I find in places that aren't readily visible. For example, when I walk to my local grocery store I cut through some trees on the side of the building. There's a lot of graffiti on that side of the building, I guess because the trees offer protection to the artists, but no one ever sees their work, since relatively few people take the footpath through dumpsters and trees to get to the store. This seems to me to defeat the purpose of graffiti, which at least has its roots in thumbing one's nose at The Man, and above all, is meant to be seen.

Mojo's, a now defunct Austin coffee shop near UT, used to have a policy of allowing artists to graffiti their building. It struck me as smart because, graffiti is hard and expensive to fight in some areas, and they got some free art out of it, as well as a lot of, I'm sure very lucrative, cred with the hipster crowd. But it does seem to defeat the purpose of graffiti, which is all about, in addition to a possible larger statement, doing something illegal, often just for the sake of it. Interestingly, I never saw an artist at Mojo's working in the daylight. Did they only paint there at night so they could kinda sorta maybe pretend they were still getting away with something?

Bottom Line: Graffiti is best when bold. I'm offering a $100 bounty to anyone who can prove they tagged Air Force 1, and I don't care what you write or who's president when you do it. Bounty will remain available until claimed. I reserve the right to seek verification.

Scientific Imaging & Looking Inside a Knee

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:55:10 +0000

Over the summer I was unfortunate enough to require a reconstruction of my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). As I was wheeled out of the clinic in an anaesthetic haze, my doctor handed me a series of photos not unlike the ones below.

After this, my second time having an ACL reconstructed, I began to wonder about why doctors would give departing patients "before and after" pictures of the insides of their knee. Without an explanation from a trained professional these pictures are practically meaningless. Is it to prove they actually did their job, that they actually replaced something in the knee? Is it to provide a little something for the scrapbook, so I can fondly remember my summer morning in the outpatient surgery center? At any rate, I think there must be some rhetorical motive for giving patients these types of pictures. And I should point out that this seems to be a convention in orthopaedic surgery. Some doctors even give their patients videos of the surgery shot through fiber optic endoscopes. I'm not sure what all this means. But when my doctor checks his handiwork later today, I'm going to ask. I'll post his answer in the comments section.

9/11 Report -- Graphic Novel vs. Authorized Edition

Nate Kreuter — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:39:25 +0000

Students in my Rhetoric of Spying Class recently read sections of the 9/11 Commission Report, along with the graphic novel version of the report (for a thorough discussion of the graphic novel version and its critics, including some great links, click here).

Reactions to the graphic novel were mixed, and more students were critical of the graphic novel version than I expected. I was also surprised by why many of the students were critical of the graphic novel. Rather than argue that it was irreverent towards the events of 9/11, many argued that the graphic novel obscured too many of the Authorized Edition's more detailed points. I'm not sure whether the students really thought this or were telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. (I personally can see a lot of advantages in the graphic novel version, such as audience accessibility, which my students also pointed out.)

At any rate, I think that comparisons of related written and visual texts can be very productive in the rhetoric/comp classroom. If you are an instructor or teacher with a story about an a similarly comparative exercise you'd like to share, we'd love to hear about it in the comments section.

Visualizing GDP

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:47:33 +0000

I found an interesting post on Reason magazine's Hit & Run blog in which the Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) of various nations are correlated with the GDPs of US states. The map is a fascinating comment on global economics, and more info on its background is available through the original Hit & Run post.

The Hit & Run blog, incidentally, is a product of the libertarian publication Reason, which, regardless of what you think of its politics, is a good place to troll for stories pertaining to visual culture. I also like to use to site to dig for news stories to use in rhetoric classes, because they are frequently argumentative and also because they tangle the typical left vs. right allegiances many of my students follow blindly, which I find allows me to open up controversies like immigration in productive ways. Again, this isn't an endorsement of the blog's specific politics, but definitely is an endorsement of its detail-oriented, non-mainstream news coverage.

Future Plans for Viz and Call for Contributors

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:46:17 +0000

Viz: The Future

First, a little background. For those of you who don't know, the re-design of the CWRL's Visual Rhetoric page as Viz and the addition of a blog was John Jones's idea. We revamped the site and added the blog in the spring while both he and I were working as the visual rhetoric developers for UT's CWRL. John was recently selected to serve as a CWRL Assistant Director, which is a two year position. He will continue to contribute to the blog, but his duties as an AD may limit those contributions. I will continue to serve as a visual rhetoric developer for the next year. Here's what you can expect to see on Viz over the course of that next year. 1) We will continue to add theory articles to the site. 2) We will continue to add assignments and bibliographic entries to the site. 3) The blog will get bigger and better. 4) We will add blog contributors and add a section to the site that will include brief bios on each contributor. 5) We will try to upload a non-copyrighted version of the visual rhetoric PowerPoint presentation we developed for use in UT's RHE 306 and RHE 309K/S classes last year, including the infamous Facebook Ambush. So, at a minimum these are the additions we're hoping to making to the site over the next year.

Call for Contributors

Now that Viz has a well-established blog, we would like to expand the circle of scholars who contribute to it. In that spirit, we are issuing a call for contributors. Anyone with an interest in visual rhetoric (broadly defined) is welcome to apply to become a Viz contributor. If you would like to be a regular or semi-regular contributor, please email Nate Kreuter at nathan-kreuter@mail.utexas.edu. If you are interested, please email your name, institutional affiliation, and position. Also, please write us a paragraph or two (nothing fancy) on why you would like to become a Viz contributor. And if you could send us a sample of relevant scholarship, either published or unpublished, that would be very helpful (but isn't absolutely necessary). We will be re-issuing this call for contributors at least monthly, as well as posting the call on other blogs, such as UT's Pedagogy Blog, through September. We will announce new contributors no later than October. The number of contributors we add to Viz will depend on the number and quality of applicants. If you want to apply or have further questions, please don't hesitate to email. If you aren't interested in becoming a regular blog contributor but would like to make a one-time contribution to another section of the Viz site, that would be great too.

Dartmouth Photography Tampering Website

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:40:45 +0000

Dartmouth has a very interesting website I just discovered that documents the manipulation of photos with examples spanning photography's history. The site is well worth checking out. Many of the examples provided touch on sensitive issues, making them potentially rich for an in-class discussion of what's at stake (rhetorically, politically, journalistically, historically) when photos are manipulated by photographers, news editors or political leaders.

Reappropriation of Visual Symbols

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:48:25 +0000

The reappropriation of the word "queer" from a pejorative term to a term of self-identity and strength for the gay community has been well documented. It's worth pointing out though that another symbol currently associated with the gay rights movement, a pink triangle, is itself reappropriated from its much more menacing origins in Nazi identification systems. The pink triangle was, like the more well-known yellow Star of David, used to mark a population the Nazis deemed threatening, in this case homosexual men. Trusty Wikipedia has a brief discussion of the phenomenon with lots of relevant links.

Nina Berman Documents Iraq Wounded

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:18:36 +0000

I recently discovered the photography of Nina Berman and have been completely bowled over by it. Her photos of soldiers wounded in Iraq are some of the most emotionally wrenching I've seen, masterful examples of the emotional impact photos can have, regardless of what you think of the current war. I have a feeling that her images will be long remembered for how powerfully they document the wounded (as opposed to deceased) casaulties of the war in Iraq. The series "purple hearts" and "marine wedding" are especially powerful. It is difficult to use anything other than superlative terms when describing this fine photographer's work. These are excellent examples for students of the pathos that individual photos can convey. I don't feel the photos themselves make an explicit argument, but they could be employed in one easily enough. Out of respect for a working professional's copyright, I will not post any of the actual photos here but encourage readers to use the hotlinks above to visit her wonderful site.

Remote Sensing, Logos Images and the Irony of Evidence

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:21:53 +0000

My take on visual rhetoric is largely informed by my prior career with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In the UT Visual Rhetoric Presentation I have a slide that depicts a photo from the Cuban Missile Crisis alongside a picture from Colin Powell's Presentation to the UN. The pictures are embedded below. I like to make the point that even though these two photos are remotely sensed, captured by a U2 spy plane and a satellite, respectively, and show raw data, presumably objective data, the pictures are hardly objective.

Because so few of us are trained military imagery analysts there is a real irony in presenting such photos to the public as evidence, for none of us can verify the contents independently. Who among us has ever seen a "Sanitized Chemical Munitions Bunker" or a "Missile-Ready Tent"? Our readings of these logos-driven, data-intensive images is entirely dependent on the government's readings of the images. They got it right in the Cuban case forty years ago, and wrong in the Iraq case four years ago.

Two very cool sites on remote sensing are hosted by the two largest US remote sensing companies, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.

Lawnmower People, Part III

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:04:14 +0000

With the summer recreation season fast approaching I wanted to put the Lawnmower People to work this week with a public service announcement. If you golf, take stock:

In what is perhaps more of a testament to my simplicity than anything else, I have to admit that these goofy lawnmower people crack me up. I would like to point out though that not all visual texts make arguments. I find when teaching Visual Rhetoric units that students initially want to see ALL images as arguments, whereas images like these really depend on the accompanying text to make any warning/argument clear, at least in the case of more complex warnings.

I would also like to point out that many of these images come courtesy of Capnwacky.

Representing Abortion

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 16:28:09 +0000

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision to uphold a ban on "partial birth" abortions, I thought it would be worth mentioning how visual rhetoric is employed in the abortion debate, particularly by pro-life partisans. Anyone who has spent much time on a large university campus has likely seen the images of protest I'm referring to in demonstrations once or twice a year, protests often coordinated by off-campus religious groups. In their most confrontational manifestations, the groups frequently employ large signs depicting very, very graphic images that they claim show aborted fetuses. I don't have enough medical knowledge to evaluate whether or not such images depict the realities of abortion. But certainly such graphic depictions have an impact on passersby. And certainly visual depictions, whether photos or drawings, will influence how people feel about abortion.

I don't wish to post any of the more graphic images pro-life groups have tended to employ, but even in the image above, taken from a Catholic pro-life site, the ostensible medical drawing is certainly designed to have an emotional impact on audiences. I leave it to readers to decide what they think of all this, but would further add that there has been a move in texts such as Sturken and Cartwright's Practices of Looking to acknowledge that even medical imaging is framed and read in a variety of subjective ways.

I am reminded of the scene in Jesus Camp (which I recently screened in my RHE 306 class) where small models of babies in various stages of development were used to talk to young kids about abortion. Instead of looking, say, fish-like, as a fetus does in the early weeks of development, the models looked exactly like newborn babies, just much, much smaller.

Visual Rhetoric Writing Exercise

Nate Kreuter — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:56:23 +0000

I recently incorporated the Garry Winogrand photo below into an in-class writing exercise. The exercise is essentially the same as one that I came up with when helping Brooks Landon teach his Prose Style course at the University of Iowa a few years ago. Keep reading to learn more about the writing exercise.

I bring a photo in to class, usually one that depicts something weird, something that probably has a story behind it but that doesn't make that story explicit. I project the photo and don't tell the students a word about it, not when it was taken, by whom, nothing. Then the students have to write about the photo. It's a creative assignment and in this case I was trying to get them to think about form. Specifically, after a workshop on the subject in the prior class, I was asking them to write "cumulative" sentences. Cumulative sentences, for those of you who aren't prose style junkies, are described in Francis Christensen's essay "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." So, the photo was just a prompt to get the students writing in a new mode that we had been working on. The exercise went very well and my students generated some whacky, but stylistically adventurous, prose. If I get their permission, I will post some of their writings in the comments soon.

Maybe this exercise isn't about visual rhetoric in the strictest sense. There's not much for us to read in this example. But I include it here, in this forum because, hell, it's close enough.

Lawnmower People Part II

Nate Kreuter — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:15:06 +0000

I may as well kick off the lawnmower people with a double-shot, since I intend to add these images periodically when the whim strikes. A second genre of lawnmower people signs depicts these generic beings not in the agonies of bodily harm, but doing things that are forbidden.