viz. - Iraq

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.*

Yes we can/no we can't

mkhaupt — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:57:22 +0000

By now, you've probably seen the moving and (I assume) influential video by the Black-Eyed Peas' Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video in support of Barack Obama, which sets Obama's New Hampshire primary speech to a stripped-down tune, the words voiced by a coterie of A- and B-list celebrities:

While some might argue that seeing/hearing Scarlett Johannson sing Obama's words might dilute their power, the video certainly helped determine where my vote, once belonging to John Edwards, would go. I had not previously heard Obama's speech, and hearing his indirect (yet rhetorically powerful) reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., sung by John Legend certainly caught my attention.

Equally interesting is the "spoof" video (one among many, I am sure), which adopts many of the same techniques, casting "real" people in the celebrities' roles and portraying their dismay at John McCain's pro-war rhetoric. The producers, "Election 08," claim that "earnest people reacting to a candidate is the future of music video":

Hoping to use al-Qaeda's propaganda against them?

LaurenMitchell — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:43:12 +0000

This article from the BBC Middle East shows that the U.S. military and Iraqi government hope that some visual evidence will help them to win “hearts and minds” in their efforts to rid Iraq of al-Qaeda.

After raiding an al-Qaeda hideout north of Baghdad, coalition forces found videos of young boys brandishing guns and grenades. The videos show about 20 boys running around with machine guns, staging mock kidnappings, and in one scene putting a pistol to the head of their “hostage.” The videos are apparently part of al-Qaeda propaganda aimed at attracting new recruits. But American and Iraqi officials hope that the “images might persuade Iraqis to turn against the Islamic militants.” It’s interesting that we’re hoping these images will turn Iraqi’s off to such activities and al-Qaeda is hoping that they will turn people on to their cause.

There's Enargeia and then there's Enargeia

Brett Ommen — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:50:22 +0000

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

Hariman’s sequence is as follows: 1) the moment of the second plane impact at the WTC, 2) President Bush as Air Force pilot, 3) the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph, 4) a photograph of (presumably) a former American soldier and his 3 prosthetic limbs, 5) the wreckage of a Baghdad neighborhood, and 6) the wreckage and casualties of a Tikrit car bombing. Images 1, 3, 4, and 6 are particularly disturbing. But seeing these images and hearing them brought up in speech are two very different experiences. It would not shock anyone, I don’t think, to hear a U.S. politician reference the plane attacks of the WTC, or to speak of a former solider dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of war, or to call attention to the violence and loss of life of street violence in Baghdad. And yet the violence of the images in the No Caption Needed post seems much more acute, potentially offensive, and may even execute a metonymic kind of violence on the viewer. This may make images more effective in imparting the emotional register of public memory, but a counterpoint to that utility is that speech offers a type of protection against the pathos of those images. I offer the contrast between visual reminders and vocal reminders, in part to show how the visual might refuse a kind of whitewashing that is possible in non-visual discourse. More importantly, I think comparing and contrasting the No Caption Needed sequence to other discourses on the public memory of 9/11 and the war on terror is an exercise that can create a more precise account of the virtues and limits of visual rhetoric in general.

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.

Baghdad bombings map

John Jones — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:43:51 +0000

The BBC has created an interactive graphic that displays Baghdad’s shifting ethnic population as well as the date and location of bombings in the city. Using the slider at the bottom of the graphic, the user can see small points appear and fade away at the bombing locations. Moving through time, the bombings become more frequent. Not only is this a well-made graphic, it is a disarmingly simple demonstration of the rising violence in Iraq’s capital city.