viz.

Image Via BagNewsNotes  

We on the viz. team are researchers & instructors at the University of Texas, interested in all things visual.  With the return to blogging for the spring semester, we'd like to begin by introducing BagNewsNotes, a site doing vital work to deconstruct the visuality of contemporary political news.  The image and commentary from Saturday (above) is representative of how BagNewsNotes reads between the lines to find what's really happening with daily media images.  The photograph catches U.S. Representative Giffords with her husband on the roof of the Tucson hospital, as Gabby is being transported to Houston for further treatment.  BagNewsNotes publisher and contributor, Michael Shaw comments on the virtual intimacy of the photo, created by Giffords' "presence and absence" in the frame.  In the weeks since the shooting deaths of six people and the wounding of thirteen others in Tucson, Giffords, writes Shaw, has become "a national icon larger than herself."

Image Via BagNewsNotes  

A post earlier in January does a close reading of photographs from the memorial service in Tucson, sensing a "potential" shift towards bipartisanship, evidenced by Obama's meditative posture and by the assemblage of previously embattled political figures, who "line up (respectfully) in a row."

Image Via BagNewsNotes

The commentary and slideshow of images from Sarah Palin's January 12th speech performs a psychoanalytic reading of her non-verbal expressions (Shaw is trained as a clinical psychologist).  Palin's "anger, resentment, and exasperation," Shaw notes, belie  emotions that would seem more apropos to the circumstances, such as "compassion."

But BagNewsNotes does more than penetrating visual analysis, which indeed it does well and persistently.  What ultimately gains the site its authenticity is that while it deconstructs visuals from mainstream contexts, it simultaneously constructs alternative images of the American political landscape.  The site does this primarily through documentary photography and audio slideshows, featured in the section called Originals and in the section called Salon, respectively.  The growing archive of images are contributed by established photojournalists, such as Nina Berman, Jeremy Lange, and Alan Chin.

We were particularly interested in the coverage of the mountaintop removal controversies ongoing in Applachia (see the Mountaintop Mining Watch series by Antrim Caskey).  We were also struck by the slideshow posted in October from New York Times photojournalist Michael Kamber, who speaks about documenting the Iraq war and about what others don't want seen.

Image Credit: "Military Censorship" BagNewsNotes and Michael Kamber

With the various kinds of image work on the site, BagNewsNotes potentially sets up a constrastive schema between mainstream news media coverage and documentary photography, a long-standing and complex question for those in the field.  It's a question we will continue in conversations with Shaw and his staff, as we begin collaborating with BagNewsNotes this spring.  Thanks for reading as we launch back into our work, and stay tuned for a variety of projects and topoi forthcoming.