viz. - multimodal composition

Framing Subjects: Arnold Newman’s Editorial Practice

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:18:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman: Masterclass exhibit with a photographer friend helped me notice more than Newman’s numerous famous subjects. Creating a portrait requires more than just telling someone to smile or to stand in fair light; good photographers must understand how composition affects the final product. Framing matters, whether that’s done by putting wood around a picture or deciding where and how you crop the shot. The exhibit allows visitors to examine Newman’s artistic process, showing the evidence of how he edited his raw photographs into finished portraits. I want to look at in this post both his famous shot of Igor Stravinsky and his created “portrait” of Marilyn Monroe to think more about what we can learn about visual and non-visual editorial practice.

As the exhibit’s catalog states, Newman’s photography was often put into the category of “environmental portraiture.” As William Ewing defines the term, this meant that Newman

would usually situate the person in their library, living room, laboratory, studio or office. But he himself was never comfortable with the term (which is just as well, since today its ecological connotations ring jarringly in our ears). He thought the “environmental” label did not give enough credit to what he termed his “symbolic portraits” [...] Newman also complained that the label was simply too restrictive: “People started calling me the father of the environmental portrait,” he explained, “[but] the moment you put a label on something there is no room to move. And I never thought in such terms, and I refuse to think in terms of labels…” (17)

His famous portrait of Igor Stravinsky, which was taken in 1946 when he was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar’s Alexey Brodovitch to photograph the composer, actually took on a significant afterlife as one of his most famous works, endlessly included in retrospectives of his career. However, it’s worth looking at the negatives to see how this portrait came to be.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The contact sheet on display in the exhibit shows four different versions of Stravinsky posed with the grand piano; each contains a different pose, whether it’s him standing with his hand on his chin, or his head tilted back as he sits before the piano. The one Newman marks to use has Stravinsky posing with his left hand against his head and his right hand holding onto the piano, his face posed straight towards the camera. The picture reaches from below the piano to the high ceilings’ crown molding above. Within the photograph’s overall composition, Stravinsky is dwarfed by his surroundings. Yet Newman’s final print makes an even more dramatic cut, choosing to locate Stravinsky in the very far left bottom corner of the picture. The framing here highlights the instrument’s centrality to understanding and representing Stravinsky, as the piano’s highly geometric lid dominates the space, but the picture’s sharp angles draw the eye back to the subject. In other words, by cropping his original picture, Newman creates a more striking portrait, one that lets the viewer feel both Stravinsky’s awe-inspiring musical talent and his gentle humanity.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

As Jim pointed out in his post, the 1962 Marilyn Monroe series is striking as well, though perhaps more so because Marilyn herself has frequently been the artist’s subject. In his series of photographs with her and Carl Sandberg, viewers can better see how Newman constructs his subject through cropping. William Ewing explains the circumstances surrounding this shoot thus:

The frame itself is one from several rolls of film exposed at a private party ... The actress is shown across the series as relaxed and playful, though a little tired, and the intimate relationship she enjoyed with Sandburg is evident and touching. However, none of this is shown in the selected fragment. One can easily imagine a magnificent Monroe portrait by Newman—one that would have become a famed icon—but the photographer never succeeded in getting the star to pose for him. (101)

The contact sheet for this series shows a variety of Monroe’s playful postures, as well as Newman’s choice of how to crop her for the finished product:

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Newman’s framing here takes even more dramatic shape than in his Stravinsky portrait, which merely chooses within a composed shot a more striking slice. Here, Newman actually cuts out another person, focusing instead just on Monroe’s face. Ewing’s following commentary on the result is entirely disapproving:

The blow-up was not a portrait in the classic sense. It was not reciprocal; it was not an exchange. Where, in Newman’s approach, the legitimacy of cropping from a 4 × 5 or 8 × 10-inch format was implicit, the same cannot be said of cropping from a casual 35mm negative. The close-up is uncharacteristically grainy and bears no resemblance to the studied compositions of all Newman’s other works. Here, we may have evidence of the corrupting influence of celebrity. Newman could not pin Monroe down, so he took his opportunity to fabricate a “portrait” from the scant materials at hand. (101)

Celebrity may have in fact influenced this creation, if only in how well the portrait’s graininess and Monroe’s pensive expression fit within her larger iconography.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Her expression, highlighted by the close crop on her face, invites viewers to see her as isolated, contemplative, or mournful. As created here, the Marilyn we see does not reflect the intimate, relaxed surroundings within the original pictures—recontextualized, it takes on a different, constructed meaning. The insistent "MUST CROP OUT" of the proof sheet emphaiszes that construction as it puts her in a new frame.

Newman’s playful self-portrait of himself posed with the Stravinsky portrait that I opened this post with I think suggests some of what framing does and allows artists, both those who work in visual and written mediums. The contexts and surroundings and cuts you make as author focus the audience’s attention for your own interpretive point—because, if portraits are meant to reveal the subject, what gets revealed is the photographer’s choice, not the subject’s.

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

The Theory and Pedagogy of viz.: Reflections on the 2010-2011 Academic Year

ladysquires — Wed, 04 May 2011 18:39:28 +0000

As the year closes, we're reflecting on the ways our posts have connected visual rhetoric, digital literacy, and pedagogy. We've presented lesson plans that use programs like Animoto, iMovie, Sound Slides Plus, Xtranormal, etc. There are longer posts that detail how these programs were used available on the blog, but in the first part of this post, Elizabeth will focus on those that present ideas for using iMovie in the classroom. In the second part of the post, Ashley will explore one of the broad themes our posts this year have addressed and talk about the ways in which we are theorizing the connections between embodiment and pedagogy.

Elizabeth: In Megan Eatman's RHE 309k: The Rhetoric of Tragedy students used, among other media, iMovie to make visual arguments in the form of narrated slideshows. In one of two posts detailing how she used iMovie in the classroom, Megan wrote The use of images often plays a large part in determining whether something registers as "tragic" in public discourse, so constructing visual arguments allowed students to build on their participation in extant conversations through engaging with the visual rhetoric already surrounding their event." Students were given time to experiment with iMovie during class and were not required to use images related to their topics while learning the program. This created a low-stakes atmosphere in which they could learn the program comfortably. Megan also constructed her own video as a model that could be shown to students. Students then had the option of using iMovie as well as other programs such as Photoshop to create multimodal arguments.

Here is the model Megan created and a link to her lesson plan:

I also began to think about how iMovie could be used in the classroom. I noticed that I was writing a lot of posts about how images and digital media were being used to enhance online experiences of poetry and bring poetry to new audiences. In particular, I was taken with this piece by poet and scholar and UT alum Susan Somers-Willett in which she worked with a photographer to create a series of docu-poems. (Sidenote: there will be an interview with Susan available on our “Views” page.)

In Verse: Women of Troy from InVerse on Vimeo.

I wanted to create an exercise that would allow students to think about documenting their own engagement with poems of their choosing. Creating iMovie files that include their reading of poems they interpret critically allows for a visual record of that interpretation and a public performance that goes beyond rote memorization.

Ashley: This marks the first year of aggressively using Google Analytics to track activity on the blog, and the data that we have gathered shows not only a growing audience for viz. but offers us a better sense of what readers are responding to. Posts that dealt with various representations of the body tended to be the most popular for all of the reasons you can imagine, but as we marked that trend, we talked about using those responses to shape a socially responsible and relevent set of posts on the theme of embodiment. These posts point to the ways in which bodies and representations of bodies function as a powerful form of visual rhetoric in our culture, and that importance has significant pedagogical implications. Our students operate in an image saturated world in which bodies are constantly circulating, so understanding how image producers and image subjects engage with their intended audience is an important part of building visual literacy.

Megan's post on American Apparel advertisements and Mike's post on the use of pornographic images in PETA ads focused on sexualization and exploitation. Both posts point to the ways in which the use of stereotypical, oversexed images may actually work against the rhetorical purposes of their creators. As Mike says of a PETA campaign that visually links nude women to animals and/or cuts of meat, "The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent."

As a counterpoint to those posts, I explored the work of two photographers who use nudes or partial nudes in very different ways. The first was Howard Schwartz and Beverly Ornstein's The Athelete, which uses images of male and female Olympic athletes to make a point about the variety of bodies that excel at particular kinds of physical activity, broadening our idea of what a fit, healthy, or athletic body looks like. Later in the semester, I had the opportunity to interview award-winning New York-based photographer Substantia Jones, who photographs nude or partially nude men and women who self identify as "fat" as part of her Adipositivity Project. Jones's project is explicitly political. She aims to challenge our notions of what constitutes a normal or even healthy body by depicting subjects whose bodies are typically either inivisible or vilified in the media and celebrating thier physicality.

The interview provided powerful insights into the ways in which a photographer can engage with her subjects in a way that celebrates rather than exploits their bodies. All of Jones's models are amateurs, many of whom approach her about participating in the project. Jones talked about how she establishes a rapport with a photographic subject who is obviously placing him or herself in a very vulnerable position: "By the time someone contacts me and asks to be an Adiposer, I presume they've already done all the "Can I really drop trou for a stranger's camera?" work. Many lose their nerve during the scheduling phase (far preferable to losing their nerve during the me-ringing-their-doorbell phase, which has happened). But I think when (and if) they open the door, they see a smiling fellow fatty--a comrade--who wants the experience to be good for all involved. What we're doing is indeed ridiculous, so we usually laugh at lot. That helps. As does a cocktail."

This interview brought over 1500 unique visitors to our site in the first 24 hours, and the posts mentioned above have been among the most popular blog entries of the entire semester. Naturally, that raises questions about how we ought to use NSFW (Not Safe for Work) or pornographic content on the blog and in the classroom. Obviously, we would be irresponsible to present such images merely for the sake of titillation or provocation, but the widespread circulation of these images speaks to a greater need for dialogue both with the public and with students about the effectiveness and responsibility of using bodies to make arguments.