viz. - history

Viz's Visual Guide to Feminism Part 1 (banner.jpg)

Laura Thain — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 14:40:00 +0000

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Visualizing the War on Christmas: Acknowledging the Pre-Christian Origins of Winter Festival Imagery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 19:41:22 +0000

Image Credit: Fox News

Every holiday season conservative political activists trying to maintain Christian supremacy in the United States bemoan an alleged "War On Christmas." According to their conspiracy theories, evil secularlists lurk behind every corner, ready to pounce on any expression of the Christian Christmas tradition. For the activists, store employees who wish customers a "happy holiday" are not trying to be inclusive. Rather, these cheerless corporate-mandated greetings serve as another boot of tyranny standing on the neck of American Christendom.

Image Credit: nknh

Such bluster is par for the course when the religious right are concerned: it is as loud as it is baseless. However, the hullabaloo does contribute to the marginalization and under-appreciation of the diverse historical sources of the imagery currently associated with Christmas that originated with various European celebrations of the winter solstice.

Image Credit: Simon Phipps

Despite what certain bumper stickers and church signs might tell you, Jesus is not the reason for the season. Early Christian celebrations of Christmas appropriated preexisting winter festival traditions, such as Roman Saturnalia or the Norse celebrations that preceded Yule.

Image Credit: Aaron Jacobs

These solstice celebrations marked the return of longer days and the promise of a bountiful growing season. Evergreen trees and shrubs, such as the pine tree and holly bush, serve as a reminder that life only slumbers but does not perish in the coldest, darkest days of winter.

Image Credit: Duncan Hall

Pagan winter traditions, though, aren't all light and joy. If you think coal in a stocking would be a disappointment, just be thankful that you don't have to deal with Krampus.

Let me close by wishing all a happy holiday season, no matter what holiday you celebrate, and offer my hopes for peace on Earth and goodwill to all.

Image Credit: Seattle Atheists

Destiny Made Manifest in a Pattern of Stars

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 02:50:23 +0000

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This could be the new flag of the United States of America. Fifty-one stars. In November 2012, Puerto Rico voted in a referendum to become the fifty-first state of the USA. The measure now awaits approval from the U.S. Congress. Whether the representatives of the fifty states will invite in Puerto Rico, currently a U.S. territory, depends, of course, on a number of factors: culture, taxes, how it would change the political dynamics of the country, among others. But there's another big deciding influence at play here, though it is less tangible, and that is how a fifty-first state would change the appearance of the U.S. flag. Why would that matter? Because the arrangement of the stars on the flag has everything to do with belief in Manifest Destiny.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

U.S. destiny made manifest in fifty stars, arranged neatly in offset rows. Fifty: not just a round number but somehow, to our simian brains, it seems a solid one. The design of the current flag reflects, I would argue, a sense of arrival. Half a hundred states. But the U.S. flag only got its fiftieth star in 1960.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The symmetry of the stars has not always appeared so manifest. Fewer stars make for a more contingent, not to say temporary, look. And odd numbers added another challenge.

U.S. Flag from 1819-1820: 21 stars (After Illinois before Alabama and Maine)

U.S. Flag from 1845-46: 27 Stars (After Florida before Texas)

U.S. Flag from 1851-1858: 31 Stars (After California before Minnesota)

U.S. Flag from 1867-1877: 37 Stars (After Nebraska before Colorado)

U.S. Flag from 1959-1960: 49 Stars (After Alaska before Hawaii)

Images from Wikimedia Commons

Thirty-one stars was a particularly awkward phase. But there is something wrong about that observation. As if the U.S. were a teenager in the 1850s. There is frankly too much suffering in the story of how the flag got its fifty stars to permit such a flippant trope. As if westward expansion, the imperialist policies of nineteenth-century USA, were motivated, even in part, by the desire for a more symmetrical seeming flag!

Might there soon be a fifty-first star? Will the democracy give up the notion of U.S. exceptionalism and go with a more contingent looking flag? Or will it seek to maintain the mythos of symmetry?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Alternate Pattern for 51 stars

What sort of "united" would a country of fifty-one states wish to project? Circled wagons or side-by-side, independent but joined in rank and file? The importance of the psychological effect of the arrangement of the stars on the flag should not be underestimated. The circular pattern which heads up this post was, according to Wikipedia, proposed by the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, which is the party that advocates for full statehood. What new image of the USA would a circular pattern instill in the hearts and minds of citizens? Who makes up such a USA? What are its policies? With what attitude do the states regard one another? What destiny does it manifest? What destiny does the country wish to be made manifest?

Archiving the Past, Archiving the Future

Laura Thain — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 21:25:38 +0000

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Archives are by definition past-oriented. The very act of “archiving” renders an object an artifact of a specific past, although its orientation within that past depends on the disciplinary practice of the archivist. 20^th century archival studies have made considerable movements toward standardization, and alongside this standardization of archival methodologies comes an expansion of that which we consider worthy of being archived. Thus, we no longer operate under the assumption that 20^th century archives will be composed exclusively of objects from a distant, exclusively white Western patriarchal past—we compose queer archives, postcolonial archives, feminist archives, and, perhaps, in the case of Bel Geddes, even archives of the future. Join me as I explore the idea of a future archive and its relationship to the archival ethos of the Harry Ransom Center, in part by exploring exhibition visitor’s own “visions” of the future.

The push for expansion of Western archives in the 20^th century operates at least in part on a simple premise: that those who write the past control the present. As the old saying goes, “history is written by the victors.” This implies a causal relationship in which the privilege of history writing is the purview of the dominant cultural force, but we must realize that power transfers both ways here—the very act of writing history can transform an underrepresented body into a powerful voice in the public sphere. So if the composition of the archive determines the perspective of the present, where can we place the future in such a schema? What place do imaginations of the future have in this archive? And how much can these imaginations serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, transforming futuristic visions into powerful agents of change?

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

The court of public opinion can help us here to determine how the idea of “the future” figures into public imagination. The Center ends the Bel Geddes exhibition with a display of Bel Geddes’ 1930 predictions of 1940. On either side of the display, there is space for viewers to make their own predictions about “the near future.”

The submissions generally break down into three categories: optimistic/utopic, pessimistic/apocalyptic, and neutral/technological. The optimistic responses reveal what viewers wish for in the future, often against the historical trajectories of the present: “nobama,” “astros win world series,” “less die,” “ Hispanic gay president,” “blending of races,” “no war or hunger,” “North/South Korean peace,” or “more pie.” As one submitted emphasizes, “HOPE! The future is now!” These optimistic views of the future make claims about what viewers desire in the present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

In the pessimistic/apocalyptic responses, viewers reveal problems the claim exist in the present which can only become more dramatic in the future: “robots will complete their domination,” “civil war,” “our plan[e]t will be really polluted,” “more wildlife species go extinct,” “war in the Middle East,” “zombie apocalypse,” and “less pie.” Although some of the responses take their apocalyptic claims less seriously than others, all use the “future archive” to levy complaints against past and present.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

Finally, there are those that, like Bel Geddes, make technological predictions that contain no value judgments. Technology is synonymous with progress in these sorts of claims, but all base their notions of future developments on the present “frontier:” “flying cars,” “materials and engineering will be based on [natural phenomena],” “everything [will be a] touch screen,” “personalized medicine using genetics,” “cheaper printers so civilians can make their own products,” “self-repairing materials,” or “deep space exploration.” These comments define what, among the current cutting edge technologies, constitutes “the frontier” and make inferences based on these assumptions, a style of futuristic archive that resembles Bel Geddean futurism more strongly than the optimistic or pessimistic visions of the future.

Image Credit: Laura Thain

I’d like to suggest that this neutral ethos is strongly related to the ethos of the Ransom Center’s archival practices in general and the role of critical distance in the process of archival acquisitions in particular. Although the Center has invested considerable resources in acquiring sources of importace to traditional notions of the Western Canon, its pre-20^th century sources often do not compare to those of older, more heavily endowed archives. Instead, what distinguishes the Center’s archive is its eagerness to extend archival resources to 20^th century materials and its attempt, most notably under Tom Staley, to acquire on the literary “frontier.” By making smart bets, or, we might say, futuristic prophesies about the future value of present literature, the Harry Ransom Center’s archival ethos shares much of the futuristic vision that its Bel Geddes exhibition celebrates.

Image Credit: Laura Thain. Click for larger image.

One final note on “archives of the future”: the rapid technological innovation the exhibition’s audiences foresee (and not without good reason) also implies that as the rate of such innovation increases, so too does the process of archaicizing older technology. But while this translates to uselessness of futility in the world of technology, archaic or the past-oriented attributes in the literary world are a precondition of canonical status. As this canonical process becomes increasingly compressed, I’d venture to predict (perhaps optimistically?) that the canon of the future will expand even further.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Image Database Review: New York City Department of Records Online Image Gallery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:49:22 +0000

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.

The Secret History of Lines

Laura Thain — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:53:24 +0000

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

With 24 hours to go, media outlets projecting the outcome of election day are covered in geographical maps of states and counties painted starkly in red and blue. I’ve enjoyed the responses of armchair intellectuals like Randall Munroe, who playfully reinterprets the red/blue divide to create a complex and comprehensive visual history of the Republican and Democratic parties. The proliferation of regional and ideological divides across multiple media this week urged me to explore two important questions in visual rhetoric: What does it mean to visualize a geographical boundary? And what does it mean to visualize an invisible line? (I would be remiss not to mention the enormous amount of border studies that exist in postcolonial and Anglophone literature and criticism—but today on viz I will try to confine myself to a discussion of the visualization of intranational borders.) Here to help me is the photography of Colin Stearns, Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons. Stearns' current project is photographing the Mason-Dixon line in order to capture "this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurence." Each of his photographs contain the invisible interstate line somewhere within their composition. I'll also put Stearns in dialogue with William Byrd II, the 18^th century commissioner of the colonial line between North Carolina and Virginia.

First, a bit about the Mason-Dixon line’s place in the historical record and in our national imagination. In his artist’s statement, Stearns recognizes the Mason-Dixon line as a “cultural barrier,” a particularly apt term considering the large discrepancy between the actual and the imagined political effect of the drawing of the line. Surveyed between 1763 and 1767, the line’s chief purpose was to settle a land dispute between the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Barons Baltimore of Maryland. The ensuing line established a firm boundary between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania and Delaware as a satellite colony of Pennsylvania with varying levels of independent government in the colonial period. (Delaware’s history of strong government influence from the dynastic governors of both Maryland and Pennsylvania no doubt contributed to the eagerness of its home-grown politicians to be the first to join, as an independent state, the newly formed United States in the 1780s).

Image Source: Wikipedia

But at no point during the colonial period did the Mason-Dixon serve as an actual dividing line between slave and non-slave colonies because there simply did not exist such a delineation. Laws explicitly prohibiting slavery, with the noted exception of Vermont, did not exist in the colonial period. (Vermont’s Constitutional Charter, which declared Vermont separate from New Hampshire early in the Revolutionary War, is one of, if not the first, abolishments of slavery among the British colonies of North America.) It was not until a full two decades after the Mason-Dixon was drawn that Pennsylvania outlawed slavery (1780); Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire did the same shortly after the recognition of the new Republic in 1783-1784. New York and New Jersey took decades to follow suit (1799 and 1804, respectively), and the line cannot be argued to have the smallest significance in slave/free state designations west of the Appalachians. Delaware, firmly north of the dividing line, did not abolish slavery until the 13^th amendment was passed in 1865. Clearly, the Mason-Dixon line had no correlation to the practice of slavery in the colonial period. It was not until the 19^th century—during Congressional debates culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820—that the Mason-Dixon line began to symbolize a politicized North/South divide that claimed slavery as its principle cultural difference.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

So how can we read the Mason-Dixon Line’s historical significance with more care? How can this reading help inform Stearns’ project and in general expand our conception of the visual representations of political boundaries? I answer this question by going even further back into the colonial 18^th century of America and examining the first significant commissioned survey of a colonial boundary—that of North Carolina and Virginia, led by failed governor hopeful and plantation aristocrat William Byrd II of Virginia.

Image Credit: UNC

Byrd published two histories of his 1728 excursion, both of which have become indispensible primary sources of both public and private life in the 18^th century colonial South. (Byrd’s secret diary, which was decoded only in the 20^th century, gives a particularly detailed glimpse into the private thoughts and cultural attitudes of a colonial husband, land owner, and slave holder.) The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina contains an official account of the survey, but the more interesting text is the semi-parodic and much more candid Secret History of the Dividing Line, which Byrd drafted for a small circle of political elite in England. It is of no small significance that it is in the Secret History, not the official account, that Byrd spends considerable time describing difference between the Virginians, who he saw as the gentile elite of the English colonies in North America, and the North Carolinians, who he describes as disorganized, uneducated, and culturally inferior. In addition, the Secret History also emphasizes that the initiative to survey the line originated within the councils of the colonies themselves, not from a royal entity. The importance of colonial sovereignty in the exercise of drawing the dividing line receives great rhetorical attention, and so the end result of these two conflicting impulses in the text is that while the North Carolinians are culturally discredited, their presence in the process of boundary-making is essential to the legality of the line formed. Byrd is thus able to legitimize the survey expedition both culturally and politically, strengthening his claim to the validity of its existence and the importance of the endeavor.

That Byrd considered these elements to belong to a “secret” history—that is, a suppressed or forgotten one—is in no small way related to the immense amount of cultural labor that surrounds the border-making project, and this is the same type of cultural labor that political factions exert and popular imagination perpetuates in the case of the Mason-Dixon line. The line became a crucial piece of evidence for both secessionist and unionist rhetoric during the various secession crises of 1820-1840, and of course, played a role in the ultimate dissolution of the Union in 1861. Beginning in the 1820’s, the survey stood no longer as a triumph of scientific instrumentation (Mason and Dixon’s survey techniques later led to the first accurate calculations of the earth’s density) in drawing an arbitrary geographical border or a legal precedent for settling land disputes between colonies and therefore states. Instead, the line was used to argue that political borders reflected an innate or organic cultural difference between each side’s respective constituents, and thus, strengthened the legitimacy of the artificial divide. And of course, unlike the lines drawn by the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Mason-Dixon line exists in physical representation, with a stone marker bearing the arms of both Pennsylvania and Maryland placed every 5 miles along the surveyed line.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

And it is artist like Stearns who reveal and interrogate the labor of creating these boundaries. Stearns’ photography does so by several means. First, he utterly avoids the iconic line-markers, choosing instead to allow a mixture of organic and architectural details to connect the physical composition of the photographs to the theoretical subject matter. In highlighting these two types of “line-drawing,” Stearns seems to emphasize both the political border’s reliance on a rhetoric of organic divide (that is, that the cultural distinctions between populations predate the proverbial drawing of a line in the sand) but its essentially constructed nature. Take, for example, this photo:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

Sometimes his photos make a primarily architectural argument:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

And sometimes they seem to make an organic one:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

But almost always, they combine elements of both.

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

If I can get away with making overarching aesthetic claims here, I would like to posit this: the audience, in the very act of viewing these pictures with the knowledge that they are visualizations of a geographical border, searches for delineation within them, even as they know those delineations are artificial. The audience thus becomes both aware of political boundaries as a cultural construction and aware of their own complicitness in creating them; the pieces no longer become a mere accusation of the stark black-and-white artificiality of manmade divides but an interrogation into the process by which we as members of society participate in the creation and perpetuation of those boundaries, even when they become oppressive.

Munroe's Complex Visual History of the US Congress. Image Credit: XKCD

The lines I’ve examined today helped to create and sustain a cultural and geographical border between the North and the South and designate them as opposing ideological spaces, creating a (bi)polarized and (bi)polarizing political rhetoric that has dominated American politics since the splintering of the Democratic Republican party and Jackson’s presidency during the aforementioned 18^th Congress of the 1820’s (but that’s another long story). Where might we go further with this investigation? Can we use extend these arguments to describe how political boundaries function in 21^st century America? Does, for instance, our current connection between political boundary and ideological identity depend less upon regional dichotomies (North/South, East Coast/West Coast) and more upon population density (urban/rural)? How does this change how we might read these invisible lines?

Dressing to Dissent at the United Nations

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 15:22:24 +0000

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

Almost every male speaker to the September Summit of the General Assembly of the United Nations wore a suit and tie. It is easy to overlook this fact, so widespread is the convention, so rare the defiance. But what heads of state wear in front of one another shows something peculiar about the modern nation state. Leaders are, by and large, drawn from the cultural and economic elite. What all this suit-and-tie wearing indicates, however, is that the ruling class of the modern nation-state must subscribe, or seem to subscribe, to middle class or “business” virtues, like hard work, entrepreneurship, merit, and self-effacement. When a male leader chooses not to don a suit and tie, a choice made by President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pictured above), he is really saying something: but what, exactly, is he saying?

Take, for example, the suit and tie worn by U.S. President Barack Obama for his address to the world on September 25.

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

President Obama's suit does not strike me as ostentatious; stylistically, it does not depart from the appearance of workaday, professional attire. (Note, however, how neatly tailored and solidly constructed the clothes are. Not every workaday businessman can afford such a suit!)

Let us take President Obama as the rule and President Ahmadinejad as the exception that proves the rule. Now, what was the historical process by which suit-wearing became the standard for heads of state? Let us speculate.

I would argue that to arrive at an answer which would explain both Ahmadinejad's and Obama's sartorial selections, we need to describe two interelated historical processes, one pertaining to the imperialist nation-states of the Nineteenth Century, the other to the nation-states formed through decolonization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Of first importance, in the imperialist case, was the long process by which the traditional power formations of the aristocracies--based on tradition, heredity wealth and landholding--were transformed into power formations of the monied classes. This transition was no neat break, including as it did, urbanization and industrialization, the rise of literacy and the popular press, the networking of global cities through shipping, railroad, mail and telegram, the increasing importance of credit to the state, the ousting from parliamentary structures of “gentlemen” by lawyers, bankers, and labor-leaders; in a word, everything (and it’s a lot) that comes as money plays more and more the determining role in social ascendancy. It was a complex historical process inflected by place and contingency; but roughly speaking, the ruling class was kings and barons and lords, and then it became businessmen and buerocratic professionals. The leaders of today's "super-power" nations wear suits, and that includes China, as instanced by Premiere Wen Jiabao (pictured below):

Image Credit: United Nations webtv.un.org

As for the male leaders of decolonized nation-states, I speculate that they wear suits-and-ties as the price of entry, as it were, into "respectable" standing at the United Nations. In a word, wearing a suit-and-tie is a matter of hegemony.

Inflecting these large, world-historical processes--the ascendance of middle-class hegemony as it played out in the West and in the era of decolonization--are other factors, including culture and gender. For of course, not every head of state or person of power wears a suit to the UN. Sometimes the choice of garb would appear to reflect culture of origin, as in the case of Lyonchoen Jigmi Yoezer Thinley, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bhutan (pictured below).

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

The military dictators wear uniforms. Many of the women wear the female equivalent of the suit-and-tie, as instanced by Dessima Williams, Permanent Representative of Grenada to the UN:

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

And, of course, to really explain why a person wears a particular article of clothing to the General Assembly we would have to tell add the histories by which "female suits" or military uniforms became available as options but also personal and family histories and psychologies, contemporary networks of clothes production and consumption, and maybe even a little randomness.

But accounting for all the different variations on suits and the military dictators and the cultural-garb--each of which could bear more analysis--there remains a specific kind of outlier, and that is the person who references the suit while flaunting its conventions. It is these I would point your attention to; these are the ones dressing to dissent, these are the leaders who are highlighting a difference from the world-hegemony that says modern leaders are business people (if they are not military dictators).

Ahmadinejad wears no tie in front of the UN, and the reason is historical and ideological, just as I have posited: according to the BBC and the Guardian, Iran banned the sale of ties after the 1979 Islamlic Revolution in order to signal non-alliance with the West.

Dressing to dissent at the UN, by my analysis, requires gesturing towards the suit-and-tie but flaunting its conventions. President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez achieves this not by foregoing the tie but through tie selection:

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

Chavez's bright, broad red tie is no business man's: it is a flaunt at the "leaders-are-professionals" hegemony of the United Nations.

Let us conclude with a final instance that stretches my theory. Pictured below is the late Noble Prize Winner Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, a non-violent protester and person of great influence. (There is a very moving Independent Lens documentary about this incredible person entitled "Taking Root.")

Image Credit: UN webtv.un.org

Wangari Muta Maathai is wearing a dress not professional women's garb. Nor does it seem to me her clothing decision can be explained away as an innocuous gesture towards culture of origin, as can the King of Bhutan's. No, I think Wangari Muta Maathai is dressing to dissent in this instance, tactically using culture and gender to do so but without falling into the "exotic performance of culture/gender" that brings into hegemonic alliance other non-suit wearers. This is a tricky feat, and it is difficult to put a finger on just how she manages it. Nevertheless, it forms an additional option to flaunting-the-suit for those who wish to perform resistance to the hierarchies of the UN and indeed the world.

“Colorizing” the Black-and-White Past

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:06:41 +0000

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

Abraham Lincoln has been colored in by means of computer software. There are more color photographs of the past today than there have ever been before: and that is because people, like artist Sanna Dullaway, are using Photoshop to colorize black and white ones. In this post, I wonder why.

To approach an understanding, it will be helpful to consider a few examples of real color photographs taken in the later Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. Color photography got its start with famed Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’swork on the perception of color in the 1850s, although it wasn't until 1907 that the Lumière brothers introduced the first commercially viable technology for color photography. In 1909, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (not to be confused with the architect by that name) hired professional photographers to go out and capture the world in true color. Here's a French scene from that groundbreaking series:

Image Credit: Musée Albert Kahn

With Lumière brothers' “Autochrome” technology, photographs from the early Twentieth Century started to flow. In the one below, a French soldier looks out from his post in Eglingen, Haut-Rhin: 1917.

Image Credit: Paul Castelnau

And below is a photograph of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915, capturing its peoples and places in color.

Image Credit: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)

These photographs shock me into a realization so basic it is hard to put into words. History is really real. The old cities were really there, in full color. Men and women looked then like they do today; streams were blue then, hair was red, clouds were white, clothes were blue. The world was just as bright in the past as it is today. Hundreds, thousands, of years ago was fully as present to those living then as today is present to us. All the black and white photos and books through which I have learned about history had allowed a creeping sort of disbelief into my attitude towards the past. I realize I have sometimes equated the past with the media through which it has been made present to me. These color photographs inspire me to imagine the past anew as pulsing, felt, immediate.

Of course, color photography is a medium; it is still a technology for capturing a visual effect and reproducing it to a now distant viewer. The immediacy I am feeling is in my imagination. I think it is this feeling of immediacy which people who are colorizing black and white photos are trying to produce.

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

In this image, artist Sanna Dullaway has colorized Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic “V-J Day in Times Square,” originally published with the caption: In New York's Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.

It's like it happened yesterday.

Representing a Revolution in Government and Medicine -- Unchaining the Insane

Ty Alyea — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Archives of General Pyschiatry

When historians seek gathering metaphors to describe the French Revolution--with its violent upheavals, experiments in re-arranging calendar time, and, of course, the demands for liberty and equality that underwrote these events--they rarely describe the atmosphere or environment of the period as particularly stable or "sane." And yet the work of Philippe Pinel--a progressive French physician who helped lay the groundwork for a major shift in mental health treatment--has been nonetheless remembered as a figurative crystallization of the Revolution's lofty, humanist goals--goals which in turn influenced the trajectory of ninenteenth century psychiatry. Today, I seek to briefly explore how 19th century visual re-enactments of Pinel's participation in a highly mythicized (and mostly apocryphyl) event--a ritualized "unchaining" of the captive patients-- were used to remind French citizens of the virtues of republican government during times of national upheaval.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of European physicians began to doubt the efficacy and morality of then-dominant methods of incarcerating the mentally ill--namely, the extensive use of chains and physical punishments to keep patients subdued, and, more generally, an emphasis upon containment rather than treatment. Additionally, on an institutional level, the asylums of France were objects of much suspicion; in the ancien regime, after all, any citizen might be one lettre de cachet away from imprisonment. In this environment, Pinel, along with several other French asylum directors, began a policy which tended to remove chains from non-violent prisoners and begin a new form of therapy called "moral treatment" in the second half of the 1790's. Though space limitations prohibit me from going into too much detail here, it should be mentioned that the "moral" treatment was based on a belief that madness--previously regarded as a totalizing condition that justified perpetual separation from society--was frequently only an imbalance in the mind that could could be realigned by various forms of therapy. As the years wore on and the lore surrounding Pinel grew, he frequently was portrayed as a single-handed avatar of benificent Revolutionary Republicanism.

Charles Louise-Muller's commemoration of the event,"Pinel Orders the Chains Removed From the Insane at Bicêtre" (pictured at the top of this blog post) was completed in 1849--near the dawn and collapse of the short-lived Second French Republic. As we can quickly notice, Pinel, who by most accounts, wasn't present when this kind of chain-removal took place, takes on a heroic pose here, dominating the center of the action amidst a band of lightness which separates him from the leagues of drab, darkened clusters of patients that line the sides of the image--almost as if he is parting a sea of madness. At the same time, the dominant colors of the image befit the flag of the Revolution: red, white, and blue. While several of the patients look at their newly free hands in shock, we also notice them looking to their savior--watching what he will do next. Largely docile, the patients accept the enlightened physician's gift of freedom and his authority.

Image Credit: Archives of General Psychiatry

Our next image is Tony Robert-Fleury's "Pinel Délivrant les aliénées," or "Pinel Delivering the insane." Painted in 1878--three year's into the third French republic--the image likewise returns to the liberatory power of the physician and the patients' debt to their liberator. In this case, however, the scene is the women's hospital of Salpêtrière, and Pinel is off-center, advising the manumission of a young, scantily clad, woman in white. As with the previous picture, we see a docile group of unfettered patients on the left hand side of the image looking calmly at the scene, and one of the women is actually kissing Pinel's hand while he stoically does his business. The women on the right, prostrate and languid, await their hoped-for freedom. Far in the background, meanwhile, we see two women moving as they please.

But ultimately, the woman in the center commands the most attention in this image, for she is both visually striking and the center of Pinel's attention as well. Susan A. Hawes of Antioch College argues that the female patient who takes center stage "assumes a position which suggests her unreason, her vulnerability to patrirarchal reason, and the taming of her dangerous sexuality." While the link portrayed here between sexual wantonness and madness is by no means a new one, Hawes points out that it became increasingly important "in this context of morally righteous 'humane' treatments." In this way, then, these images, which were likely comissioned to reinscribe revolutionary era values into France's later republican contexts, bear out Michel Foucault's claim that we should see Pinel's work as emblematic of a general shift in discipline and governmentality toward more discretely professsionalized forms.

Don't Miss Your Chance--"El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:39:14 +0000

Image credit: The Blanton Musuem of Art

El Anatsui’s art is haunting. The shimmering bottle tops of his most recent pieces, meticulously netted and woven with the help of his young crew, speak of previous uses, prior intents, and pasts that pummel and prod. A retrospective exhibition of the Ghanaian artist’s 30-year career is currently on view at UT’s own Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition, “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa,” is a wonderful investigation of the tangible ways that the past weaves itself into our present.

A few weekends ago, I roamed through the exhibition, utterly amazed and dazzled by Anatsui’s use of reclaimed and repurposed materials to make art that spoke of the history of the artist, his materials, and West Africa. One of the many standout pieces from the exhibition was Akua’s Surviving Children from 1996, which was constructed during Anatsui’s residency in Denmark.

Image credit: The October Gallery

Although Anatsui was invited to Denmark to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of Denmark’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, his Akua does more than just jubilantly praise the end of centuries of horror. His materials hint at a history of violence and oppression, as he uses driftwood from a Danish shore and nails from a foundry that used to manufacture the very guns that were used by Danes to round up slaves on the Gold Coast. The driftwood, slowly worn down by the waves, is reimagined as a group of marching people with fire-blackened faces; the nails, made at the very site that used to manufacture weapons that caused the subjugation of millions of Africans, have been reimagined as the glue that holds together the marchers. A shared past of subjugation and violence haunts the marchers who stand, defiant against all odds.

Instead of driftwood and nails, another standout piece from the exhibition, 2008’s Oasis, uses Anatsui’s signature technique of woven bottle tops from liquor bottles. The juxtaposition of the aesthetic value of a piece like Oasis (which really does feel like a drink of cool water) with the moral message (just how many liquor bottles were consumed for Anatsui to make his art?)—is staggering. As tangible representations of a community’s consumption, the liquor bottle tops—with names like “Liquor Headmaster”—are woven into a traditional art form from West Africa, cloth. The past is revisited (and possibly mourned?) through traditional weaving techniques using unconventional materials.

Image Credit: Jane Katcher / Peter Harholdt

But, as discussed in a recent talk between El Anatsui, curator Lisa Binder, and art historian Moyosore Okediji, Anatsui’s work isn’t just about mourning the past—it’s also about chance and movement. Anatsui’s bottle top weavings aren’t just social and political statements. They’re beautiful and freeform, too. The display of Anatsui’s art is left to the whims of museum curators, who choose to show us glimpses of the backs of the pieces, which often are as beautiful as the fronts. Anatsui’s work makes us gaze just a little longer; it makes us take a second look. His pieces are remade with our every glance. There is hope that the past, too, can be remade and reshaped just as the curators shape Anatsui’s art, which itself reclaims, by chance, materials that others had left for dead.

Don’t miss your chance to see “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa” in Austin. The exhibition is at the Blanton Museum of Art until 22 January 2012.

Tearing Up My Heart (and My Grounds)

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:24:13 +0000

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I’m a bit nervous and distracted right now, as I’m in the middle of preparing to go to Ottawa for the CSECS/NEASECS conference this weekend, and anticipating the following weekend’s jaunt to St. Louis for the MMLA Conference. My plan to manage to stress involves using my blog posts for the next two weeks to examine my paper topics through the lens of visual rhetoric.

For the CSECS/NEASECS conference, I’m going to be presenting a paper on Adam Smith and Edmund Burke entitled “Fragmentary Selves: (Aesthetic) Living with the Man in the Breast in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” While the title may be overlong, it’s in part because I’m trying to balance within the paper a discussion of the Burkean sublime and how Smith uses that aesthetic rhetoric to discuss and picture an ideal self that is so responsive to the feelings of others that such a self is in part fragmented by this openness. The connection that I see between this paper and my work here at viz. is through the trope of ruins.

Ruins, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, were a huge obsession of the eighteenth century. The Victoria and Albert Museum website describes the place of ruins in eighteenth-century landscape painting as aesthetic objects, in particular examining the work of William Gilpin. Ruins are also important as signs of empire: both the fallen Roman Empire whose writers people like Pope tried to emulate, and the emergent British Empire whose rise would be documented by writers like James Thomson. However, I see Burke and Smith connected with ruins in how all of these objects meditate on the construction of the self (either historically, physically, or emotionally), and the contemplation of its possible fragmentation. A text that I’d like to look more at for my prospectus that I think connects in usefully is C.F. Volney’s The Ruins, or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, translated into English in 1795.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

In this most interesting book, a first-person narrator is traveling through the East, meditating on the fallen empires, when he is accosted by the Genius or spirit of the ruins, who proceeds to give him the history of the ruined grounds upon which the narrator looks. Ruins here not only stand in for history, but also have the ability to speak and to interact with their observers. The sentimental tears of the narrator align him with a particular novelistic tradition of sympathy, like Smith, but this openness ends up shaking the foundations of his beliefs about empire. Here, the sentimental scene of a man looking upon ruins forces him into a violent confrontation with the object he sees, before which he is powerless. Being an eighteenth century self thus in these texts requires the self to always be open to being a ruin. The desire to construct aesthetic follies like Wimpole’s Folly, pictured at the top of the post, also speak to a desire for a constructable authenticity and relationship with the past. We want not just to know the past, but to be able to create it as well.

Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to add more speculations here about the visual rhetoric of eighteenth-century ruins. If you’ve enjoyed these speculations and want to read something further, I’d recommend Lynn Festa’s Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France and David Marshall’s The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot.

Mapping Relations

EmilyBloom — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:54:12 +0000

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history. Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares. The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record. Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention? And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Most immediately, the family tree implies the presence of roots—a metaphor that Alex Haley significantly mined in his book and miniseries. The Times (London) used a similar visual metaphor in a family tree for Barack Obama in which they, rather tastelessly, represent his African ancestors as the roots and his American ancestors as the tree.

Image Credit: Times (London)

Issues of subterranity are rendered even more explicit by trees revealing hidden histories, particularly, as in the case of Michelle Obama’s geneology, histories of slavery, interracial kinship and upward mobility. On the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,” scholars discuss the significance and meanings of Michelle Obama’s family tree. Among these voices, several expressed doubt about whether the family tree can generate significant public debate on the issues it reveals. As Mary Frances Berry writes, “race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved.” Other scholars lamented the inability of the genealogical chart to tell the history it purports to represent. Martha Hodges writes that the simple line connecting two individuals does not reveal the violence that could be contained in that encounter, particularly between a slave girl and an unknown white forbearer. On the other hand, Ira Berlin points out that the connecting line not only obliterates violence, but also other complicated emotional connections between individuals. In both cases, the family tree does not depict affective ties—whether those of pain, shame, betrayal, love or joy.

Image Credit Left: Clauset, Moore and Newman in Nature

Image Credit Right: The Boston Herald

In a recent article in Nature, “Networks: Teasing out the missing links,” Sid Reidner describes the limitations of the family tree's “highly unrealistic, insular population” in our age of increasingly complex social organizations. Reidner cites work by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman in creating a "hierarchical random graph" that represents the links omitted in a standard family tree. While the creators of this model use it to predict relationships when information is missing, this chart also offers an interesting visual representation of relations that emphasizes the multiplicity of links, rather than the simple procreative line. While a much messier affair, the Clauset, Moore and Newman model makes for a more compelling glimpse into the Affleck-Damon connection, for instance, than a tree– no matter how deep the roots.

Arab Image Foundation

micklethwait — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:34:44 +0000

The progressive deconstruction of Orientalism is catching up with information technology. Since 1996, the Arab Image Foundation, based in Lebanon, has been amassing a digital collection of photographs from the Arab world.

What's refreshing about this collection is that it leaps beyond the topic of the Western gaze (popularly studied by such likes as Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem) to offer up thousands of unfiltered photographic self-representations from the modern Arab world. In short, this collection stands as a visual counter-argument to the tradition of harem girl postcards and romanticized portraiture that emphasize the "biblical" antiquity of the peoples of the Middle East.

Their website has two features: a publicity section and an image search that requires free registration. Registration allows you to create your own portfolio of images found through keyword searches, photographers' names, studios, collections, genre, technique, etc. Sadly, there is no dynamic browsing feature as you might find on image sites like Flickr.com or Ffffound.com, so it's not a friendly place for the cyber-flaneur. Best to know what you're looking for before you visit.

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)

Madam and Eve

Sarah Wagner — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:52:25 +0000

Check out Madam and Eve, a great cartoon set in South Africa:

In another blog entry, I confessed to having learned most of my Vietnam War-era history through Doonesbury. It's true, and I'm not ashamed. Like The Daily Show, history with concurrent criticism isn't such a bad thing. When I started reading this strip, I was sucked in immediately, mostly because of the chance to get an alternate world view. I started looking up things like the phrase "bring me my machine gun" and learning about Zimbabwean/South African relations before it come into the American news cycle. Very cool.

Slate serializes ‘Ronald Regan: A Graphic Biography’

John Jones — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 14:02:02 +0000

If you are teaching comics at all this semester, you might be interested in Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography by Andrew Helfer, Steve Buccellato, and Joe Staton. Slate is serializing the entire text this week. Slate also serialized The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (it’s no longer available) this time last year.