viz.

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Beyonce's publicist has created quite a media stir about photographs taken of the star's Super Bowl performance.  On Tuesday this person apparently requested that Buzzfeed remove several "unflattering" images from the "33 Fiercest Moments from Beyonce's Halftime Show" gallery.  The request was fruitless, considering the photos are still up; but it may have served a hidden purpose in igniting a flurry of posts, like Huffington's, that deny Beyonce has ever taken an unflattering photo.  As the title suggests, Buzzfeed's controversial story adopts a playful, celebratory tone rather than a critical or parodic one. Its string of increasingly intense photos and enthusiastic captions create a mounting sense of the star's "ferocity," culminating in her mock deification ("Beysus knelt down to bless the audience") and popular coronation ("basically every moment was fierce...Because she's Queen B"). So why would anyone view this as bad publicity?

My hunch is that the publicist does not actually view the photos as damaging, but rather, understands the popular fascination with that which is deemed "unflattering." Labeling the actions or images of a celebrity as unflattering heightens the public's interest in them, and the resulting mediated exchange of criticism and support for the star is what's known as buzz. But in Beyonce's case, the unflattering label has been applied in an unusual way. This blog post explores why that is, and how the special deployment of this label asks us to readjust our idea of what's artificial and what's real.

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Wild Animals I Have Known pamplisest via Landmarks

Last week I posted Part I of my interview with Susan Somers-Willett. Today I'm excited to bring you Part II in which we continue to talk digital poetics and new uses of ekphrasis. Susan holds forth on other projects, including her work with UT's Landmarks prorgram and the Blanton Museum's poetry project. We also discuss her upcoming work that responds simultaneously to the recent Abu Ghraib photographs and early 20th-century lynching photographs.

  via "Women of Troy," In Verse on vimeo

A few months ago, I happily stumbled upon and blogged about poet, scholar, and UT alum Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s docu-poetry project “Women of Troy.” Recently,  Susan kindly took a break from her busy semester of writing and teaching to have coffee with me. We talked about multimedia poetics, issues of representation, the complications of collaboration, and the role of technology in the poetry classroom. Because the transcript of our interview is rather long, you can read Part I of our conversation below. I'll post the second installment next week. After that you'll also be able to find the interview in its entirety on our "Views" page.

(Image Credit:  Substantia Jones, Adiposivity.com)

Substantia Jones is an award-winning, Manhattan-based photographer whose work has been featured in The New York Times and showcased at galleries and shows throughout the Northeast.  Her website, The Adipositivity Project, is dedicated to documenting and celebrating bodies that are typically invisible--except as negative examples--in modern media.  In her own words, Substantia promotes size-acceptance "not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen."

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to exchange emails with Substantia and develop a post that would showcase some of her favorite photographs. Her answers to my questions are in bold. Many of the photographs below are NSFW. 

Temeca Freeman via J'Adore Magazine

On 10 March, 2011, Germany’s Pro7 TV aired a story about U.S. “po” model Temeca Freeman in New York City for Fashion Week. As a butt model, Freeman voluntarily welcomes people to stare unabashedly at her backside.  But Pro7’s story went beyond a curious stare and into a visual “fressen” – a German term which means to devour, or consume like an animal.  NSFW content after the break.

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate.  One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples.  Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats.  Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives.  The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

The New Yorker recently published this profile of Pascal Dangin, the most sought-after photo retoucher in the world of high-fashion. Author Lauren Collins notes that retouchers are often forced to work in secret:

[R]etouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

The article should be great fodder for studying the rhetoric of the body and the use of photography in our society.

Miss Landmine Angola is an art project by Morten Traavik designed to raise awareness for Angolan landmine survivors. Here’s the Miss Landmine Manifesto:

* Female pride and empowerment.
* Disabled pride and empowerment.
* Global and local landmine awareness and information.
* Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity-historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.
* Question established concepts of physical perfection.
* Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.
* Celebrate true beauty.
* Replace the passive term ‘Victim’ with the active term ‘Survivor’

And have a good time for all involved while doing so!

The project is complicated, seeing as it is based on the controversial beauty-contest model, but it might serve as a useful classroom example for talking about the body and the ways it can be represented.

via: Boing Boing