viz.

(Image credit: The New York Times)

With last week’s tempestuous events in the middle east, the subsequent chaos on the U.S. presidential campaign trail, and news of a professional peeping Tom in the south of France, much was lost on the American public concerning the strange and unexplained absence of Xi Jinping, the man in line to be the next president of China. Mr. Xi disappeared completely from public view on September 1^st, leaving only wanting pundits to explain what they thought might be reality. Think about it. Imagine if we lived in an ascendant country and our leader-in-waiting suddenly vanished from the public eye for longer than two weeks. Furthermore, imagine if we lived under a government that lacked any sense of transparency, and under which a freethinking blog post such as this one might warrant imprisonment, all the while the ruling elite might not proffer any explanation concerning our presumptive leader’s whereabouts. We’d be anxious, and the Chinese were last week. Anyways, the reason I bring this event up isn’t to inform the average American about global events (that’s their own responsibility and their newspaper’s job), but rather, I think the whole circus surrounding Xi’s absence provides a unique insight into the ways that China’s ruling elite attempt to visualize their control.

Screen shot of narrated slide show, Shelter for the Scarred

 featured on Washington Post website

Photographer: Carol Guzy

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