viz. - Representing the body

Beyoncé's (Unflattering?) Halftime Show

Calliope — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 02:21:04 +0000

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.

What does the word unflattering mean, on a basic semantic level? Let's start with the "flattering" part. To flatter someone is to compliment them--stroke their ego--by stretching the truth. Things that flatter also involve a kind of deception. For instance, a flattering outfit or photograph hides what is unsightly, or by some measures, what is real. Thus, unflattering poses, pictures, and representations body forth the real without the manipulating or sterilizing it. (I realize that this definition is not as nuanced as it might be, but bear with me).

I use the phrase "body forth" intentionally, because tabloids and other celebrity spin machines typically associate the unflattering with certain kinds of bodily display. There is an entire industry devoted to documenting these "shocking" postures. When I Googled "unflattering celebrity photos" the Daily News piece "Meanest celebrity photos" came up along with millions of other hits (don't let the title fool you--the photo captions are merciless not sympathetic). Many of the 96 images in this gallery focus on bodily imperfection, contortion, malfunction, etc. Close-up shots direct the viewer's attention to the most grisly part of the subject's anotomy, as in the photo expose of Madonna's toenails below.

Image Credit: http://www.nydailynews.com

From the same treasure trove, here is one of Christy Turlington sporting a sweat stain that would make any ten-year-old snicker.

Image Credit: http://www.nydailynews.com

In both cases, the photographs reveal the real condition of the celebrity body, the body that exists beneath its manicured exterior. Questions of whether this kind of unflattering display is universally interesting, or whether it is ethical to publicize, are up for debate. But for our purposes it offers a point of comparison to the kind of labelling that occurred with Buzzfeed's Beyonce montage. The publicist's take-down request suggests that some of the published images--many of them capture the singer in the act of belting out a tune or grimacing theatrically to express feeling--do not show the singer in the best light, explicitly describing them as "unflattering." But, frankly, none of the Beyonce Super Bowl photos are remotely unflattering, at least when measured by the industry standards discussed above. Yes, we see (nearly) every nook and cranny of Beyonce's figure, but her nails are painted, her fishnets aren't torn, and her body appears smooth, muscular and hairless.

So, if the pictures exhibit no sign that Beyonce inhabits a real body--through bulges, rolls, discoloration, etc.--then what is there to raise an eyebrow at? The critique (ironically initiated by the star's own publicist) seems to be aimed at Beyonce's artistic performance instead of her personal appearance, the usual domain of the tabloid smear campaigns discussed earlier. This raises an interesting question. Can a performance, or a piece of art, be unflattering to the artist? It may be helpful to recall how we previously defined the word unflattering: something is unflattering if it fails to cover up undesirable aspects of reality. In the realms of musical or dramatic performance the term could therefore refer to the performer's fallability, or to signs that the dialogue is scripted and the production budget low. In Beyonce's case, though, it actually seems like the intensity rather than the quality of her performance is under scrutiny. The photo below is indicative of the ones singled out by the publicist's email.

Image Credit: screenshot from Buzzfeed.com

Calling photos like this unflattering--photos that reveal a performer's personality, feeling, effort, or unpredictability--suggests that there is no place in popular entertainment for real self-expression. Only highly choreographed, controlled movements can be flattering and feelings must be pantomimed, not truly felt. They certainly can't be grunted.

An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part II)

ebfrye — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:58:01 +0000

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.

EF: Do you think this kind of hybrid medium (poetry, photography, web content) will proliferate as we move more into digital poetics and digital modes of access? What kind of multimedia poetics do you find to be engaging?

SSW: Yes, I do. I think Kwame Dawes’s work is really exciting. He’s working in a similar mode of going into various communities, and documenting people or events within those communities, though I don’t know how much audio work he’s working on right now. His pieces have him reading the poem, so adding the element of interview footage was unique to my project and Natasha Trethewey’s project and what Erika Meitner’s project will become.

I feel like we’re on the verge, as Kwame’s, Natasha’s, and Erika’s projects will inspire people to approach this in a different way. It’s not like this is completely new mode of expression. James Agee and Walker Evans’s collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is probably the most famous example, but clearly there’s not a digital element to that. I think as far as the combination of audio and video and textual production goes, the more publishing becomes easier and more accessible through technology and our use or misuse of it, we’re going to see more of it. It’s a very specific combination. Poetry, audio, photography. Text, sound, image. I probably just need to think a little outside the box on that. Such a trinity doesn’t necessarily have to have a documentary focus.

For instance, consider what they did with the Blanton poetry project. You have the piece of artwork, the poem, and the interview with the project. There’s also the Landmarks projects at UT.

Screen Shot, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, collaboration with the Blanton poetry project

EF: Could you talk a bit more about your involvement with Landmarks?

SSW: Let me explain what I think I did, because I really don’t know what I did. I called what I did for Landmarks my “bonkers poem” because it was drawing on so many different elements at which I was surely unadept. They asked me to respond to the piece by David Ellis that he created at UT in a period over a month called Animal. What he does in terms of his process—David has a large oversized canvas, a high res. camera that’s over the piece of canvas or surface, and he paints on the floor and he paints an entire mural, and then he paints over it, and then over it, and over it again while the camera captures the entire process in time-lapse photography. In the resultant video, David’s painting starts to morph and change, and then you see elements of the old painting showing through either because the paint is translucent or he has left elements that would read as blank space but they’re not blank space. It’s just the old showing through in the new. And the final piece is a 9-minute video of him doing this process for a month. When I saw it for the first time, it blew my mind and then I thought, “How the hell will I write about this?” It’s so ephemeral and, well, bonkers. If I were to approach it in the traditional ekprhastic way, it would be like taking stills from a film and trying to describe those scenes, but that doesn’t capture the excitement or energy or beauty of what David is doing in his work. It would be textbook.

Screen shot, David Ellis, video still from Animal, via Landmarks

I decided to approach it from the angle of David’s process and apply that process to my own work as a writer. One thing that came to mind, one concept, was the palimpsest. I was thinking of erasure, writing under writing, a new poem that’s showing through old writing, the old painting showing through the new paint that’s on top of it . I looked for examples in literature that modeled that paradigm, and I thought of Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow where she’s taken a 19th- century novella and taken Wite-Out® and erased certain parts of it so that on each page of that book, there splays a little poem. It’s like haiku, but not syllabic. Her poems in that book are shaped by whatever words are on the page. I read that and it was so exciting, experimentally, but incredibly accessible. So with David’s piece and then with Mary Ruefle’s model in mind, I created the poem Wild Animals I Have Known. There are other pieces in the same vein such as Travis MacDonald’s "The O Mission Repo" that uses redaction as its method. Ruefle’s book and the tradition of erasure in visual art and in performance art in which artists will cut out something or burn something to create were my main inspirations.

I decided to find a source text that corresponded with David’s piece Animal, and I wanted the source to be local, because David’s text stemmed from images that he saw in Austin and included some ambient sounds associated with Austin. I did a search in the HRC [Harry Ransom Center] to see what they would have associated with animals, specifically crows or grackles. I was so haunted by the image of a grackle in David’s piece. I found a book that had to be public domain, and I came across this text Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. In that collection of nature stories, there was a story called “Silverspot the Crow,” and I got my hands on a couple of original texts of that book and decided to use redaction in the spirit of David’s piece. But, I wanted to make it read as a whole. I didn’t want it to read in just parts like other poets had done, in a one-poem-per-page, haiku-like fashion. I wanted to create a poem that would, through the process of redaction, span the entire length of the piece and tell a narrative like David’s piece. So, it became a sectioned poem, but the stanzas are created page by page, so one stanza is one page.

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

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, stanza 3 of Wild Animals I Have Known, via Landmarks

I gotta tell you, I met David when we premiered his piece and my poem at Art Night Austin E.A.S.T. tour last fall in Austin, and he and I became such great friends. I was really honored that he was excited about the poem, and he said that I felt like I understood his artwork and “got it”, so that was a really nice. I think my strength as a collaborator is having conversations with other arts and artists, so that’s why I found employing his process so engaging and interesting. Even though we weren’t having a literal conversation at that time, our arts were in conversation and not just in terms of image or subject matter but in terms of process.

EF: Have any of these multimedia projects impacted your teaching?

SSW: I do present these works in my classes, and I do have my students in my workshops write ekphrastic poems. However, I don’t at the moment have the capabilities to mentor students through this process, but I would like to in a perfect world with a lot of funding and time. I use technology in the classroom as much as I can as someone who works in a workshop-based environment. We have to do a lot of one-on-one face time, too. I do use media to teach. I use a lot of audio pieces and video pieces to talk about poems and to teach aspects of poetry as well as let the students hear people perform their work and get it in the mouth and in the body and in the ear. I don’t know if that’s part of my participation in these projects. I think that interest existed before I got involved with them. Maybe these projects are an extension are part of my interest in exploring various media, which is always an aspect of my teaching.

EF: What are you working on at the moment?

SSW: An ekphrastic project that has evolved a lot over the last few years. It’s been percolating for a while. I thought I would be writing about early photography until I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs. Contemplating those, which was really hard, made me start thinking about how we represent and experience images of torture. Also, I was looking through the book Without Sanctuary, which is of images of lynching in America for another class I was going to teach on race and gender and the image. I had experienced those images before but not put it together that I was having the same emotional and physical responses to those images when I was looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think with both of those kinds of photographs, one of the hardest things to deal with is how the images are hailing me as a viewer, not just the acts themselves, which are terrible and gut wrenching. They hail all of as viewers, maybe not in the same way, but for me it calls me out and, because of my race or my nationality, constructs an identity of complicity with torture that I want to but can never absolutely reject.

Screen shot, "Standard Operating Procedure," via salon

So, for example, when I look at the Abu Ghraib photos, I feel among many other emotions, I feel this call of “You did this. You as an American did this.” I feel that the American military under the auspices of protecting people, protecting Americans engaged in these acts, so that by seeing Americans do this, I share an identity as an American, that I am implied and complicit. It’s the same thing with the lynching photographs. One of the commonly fictionalized crimes among black men who were lynched is that they were rapists or somehow a threat to white women’s sexuality, so looking at those photographs I feel that I am somehow… middling by default of how I am socially hailed in the Althusserian sense. It’s not like I condone those acts, but that’s the weird difficult space that I want to explore in my poems. What I’m currently attempting to do is represent these images in formal pairs, have a poem about the Abu Ghraib photos and then a poem about the lynching images on facing pages. By formally pairing poems about these images, I hope they can work in a lot of different ways, work as positive negative, recto verso, and all imply the photographic process itself. Though I wouldn’t call myself a New Formalist, I think as poets, we’re all formalists, some writing in received forms and some not. Otherwise, we’re prose writers.

Screen shot, "The corpse of Clyde Johnson. August 3, 1935. Yreka, California." via Without Sanctuary

On the topic of form, I think there’s an interesting resurgence of received forms, especially in African American poetry. Patricia Smith recently gave a reading at my home institution, and I asked her “What’s up with all of these received forms?” Patricia’s “Motown Crown” is amazing because she’s talking about boogying to Motown in a crown of sonnets—funk meets formal. It’s really smart. Natasha Trethewey, who has also been doing sonnet crowns, said to me that one thing that’s interesting about African American poets using those forms is that they were never meant to use those forms in the first place. So there’s always a kind of transformation of the received form simply in its contemporary use.

EF: I’m so excited to read, hear, and watch your future projects. Thanks so much for the interview.

SSW: You’re welcome.

On representing "the city and its women": An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part I)

ebfrye — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:17:33 +0000

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.

First, a word about the "Women of Troy" project:

In 2009, Somers-Willett teamed up with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski to represent the experiences of women living below the poverty line in Troy, New York. The collaboration aired on Public Radio International/WNYC program Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen and BBC Radio, and a print version appeared with Kenneally's photographs in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Among multiple honors, “Women of Troy” received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media in 2010.

More about Susan:

Susan is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry and a book of criticism. Her first book of poetry, Roam, won the Crab Orchard Review Award series in 2006 and was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for poetry. Her second book, Quiver, published in 2009 with the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Series in Poetry, received the 2010 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2009 and has been cited by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. Her writing has been featured by The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Our talk:

EF: Tell me a little bit about the process of putting together "Women of Troy." How did you come to the project?

SSW: I had a call from Ted Genoways, editor-in-chief of VQR. He had been talking with Lu Olkowski about doing some multimedia pieces in the vein of Kwame Dawes’s work with the Pulitzer Center. Ted was also connected with Brenda Ann Kenneally who hails from the Troy area and has been documenting women in that community for 6 -7 years now. He had known all of us in those various spheres and brought us together. Lu and Ted had been talking about putting together a series of documentary poetry projects with the multimedia elements of radio and photography. “Women of Troy” was the first of those projects.

My introduction to the project and Troy, New York was visual, through Brenda’s photographs, or some of them at least. What I saw in those photographs was stark and shocking and challenging for me as someone who identified as a white, middle class woman, and I knew that was exactly why I needed to do the project because it would and has caused me to think about class in much more conscious ways.

EF: Do you remember which photographs you saw first and which images you found to be most striking?

SSW: I saw a slideshow of Brenda’s work that someone had put together. I remember a photograph of a mother (whom I would later learn was Kayla), father, and baby. The father had a huge knife laying on his belly. I later found out it was a toy knife. I also saw an image of a woman lying on a bed holding a gun. I assumed it was real, but I don’t know. Those weapons really stuck with me the first time I saw Brenda’s work. I felt that there was a threat there.

I saw pictures of children living in only what I could describe as squalor, in these bare, crumbling backgrounds. Their environments seemed so chaotic, but later I found out they were moving all the time. That was my one trepidation when I was thinking about going into this environment, but it was never as dangerous as those photographs necessarily depict.

So, when I think about my first impressions of looking at those photographs, it’s actually kind of funny to me, knowing what I know now about Troy. In a lot of ways, these women are just like you or me, loving their families fiercely and trying to get by with what they have, and often I identified with them more than I felt an economic or social divide. At other times, the economic divide was very sharp, but the social divide still felt distant and I never felt threatened. I think my experience of that environment and the very specific vision that Brenda is promoting or trying to get across in her photographs is different. She sees herself as someone who got out of that community. She has a different perspective on how she wants those women to be represented. She wants them to get out and educate themselves and still be tough and mean and still have their street cred. but not be trapped in that cycle of poverty and gossip and all of the she said/she said that’s there. My main goal was to observe, and to do my best not to paternalize or exploit. It’s not that Brenda’s and my goals are mutually exclusive; I just think we had different processes and agendas.

Photograph, Brenda Ann Keneally, from Upstate Girls

What was your writing process like? How did it dovetail with Brenda Ann Kenneally’s process?

SSW: Brenda was shooting the entire time that we were there. I was there for a week in May and then I left for a month and wrote 24/7. Then went back in early June for another ten days and then wrote for another month. My time in Troy wasn’t like sitting down have and having coffee over an interview. It was real fieldwork. We were staying up until 3:00 in the morning at times. I was staying up with Billie Jean partying with her friends and then getting up to ride with D.J. to drop her kids off at school at 7:00 a.m. The schedule was grueling and I got really sick at the end.

When I was in Troy, I was with Brenda who was already accepted as a member of that community. She hails from that area. She talks like the gals in Troy and has their swagger. So who knows what I would have experienced if we hadn’t worked as a team, but I feel that Brenda gave us the credentials to be in that community and for those subjects to accept us. I feel that we would not have been as able to get as deep and entangled in their lives if it had not been for her inviting us in, and I am very grateful for that.

EF: For how many of the photographs were you present? How did that change your writing process?

SSW: I don’t know if I can give you a number because there were so many different productions. I think the majority of photographs were taken before.

One of the things that I learned in my time there watching Brenda photograph is that she directs her subjects not to smile. I remember being very vividly being in a house documenting a teenage girl and Brenda kept saying, “No smiles! No smiles!” It was like seeing the man behind the curtain, or the woman behind the curtain in this case, in the production of that image because it underscored the constructed-ness of documentary images, but I think she does it in a very powerful way that has no equal. She says what she wants to say with those images.

EF: Were you involved in the editing process? Did you know what photographs would be paired with your poems? In what order?

SSW: I was not involved in the editing at all, and it’s probably a good thing. That was Lu’s doing, and she hired filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar to edit it together. The input that I did have—I had written “Women of Troy,” and I had seen a show Brenda had done at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, a non-profit, in an old converted church in Troy. They fund and sponsor community projects, and their building is right across the street from the main house where all of the gossip and stuff goes on, where Kayla lives with her family, where everybody goes and talks, gathers. That stoop is always crowded. Roseanne, Billie Jean’s mother, lived in the unfinished basement of that house at the time. But, the Sanctuary supports Brenda’s work quite a bit. They had a show called Upstate Girls, which is Brenda’s continuing project, a show of all of her photographs, D.J.’s photographs, Dana’s photographs. They were able to open it up to the community, and the women could write on the wall around the photographs and have a conversation with those images.

I had seen that show and there were a few key specific photographs that I reference in the poems. The last image of “Women of Troy” is of this young girl holding a sparkler. I knew that would go well with the last stanza of the poem, “You are the city and its women/ wailing darkly and bright to bless/ your city as it burns, this city/made of your light.” So, although I gave one or two suggestions about what images might correspond to the poem, most of the images spring from their own contexts rather than being literal referents.

In another poem, “A Call to Arms,” the very last image in that poem stems from a photograph of Billie Jean. The last few lines are about a women going down the block to take the beating someone says she deserves and the photograph is Billie Jean receiving a pocketknife from a friend of hers as she is preparing to go down the block and take the beating. That was one of the few literal referents I included.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: How were issues of representation involved for you as a poet and as a collaborator?

SSW: I don’t really know how these women would choose to represent themselves [visually]. The dialogic aspect of this project really attracted me because I knew that through the radio and the audio aspect that we would be able to hear their voices.

I discovered that there’s a thin line on appropriating voices, and the line always seems to be moving. I kept asking myself, “What’s the right way to represent the women? Should I be representing them at all?” At AWP, Erika Meitner was talking about trying to avoid “ruin porn” in writing about photographs of Detroit. The bottom line is you don’t want to fetishize the aspect of of a subject’s experience simply because it’s edgy or shocking for a particular readership, even though that response is probably inevitable for some folks.

Lu and I got to know these women as women and as friends, and we got to know their families. Nothing’s ever easy in the field of documentary studies, but that was an aspect that attracted me to the project. I knew that through the audio tracks that we would hear their voices, too. I knew that it wouldn’t just be me speaking or representing their voices, and I hoped that it would turn into a conversation.

Something that I found was really interesting was that some audiences had heard only the radio pieces, which had some interviews with the women introducing the poems that I had read and an interview the Brenda. The poems were intercut with interview and audio, so it was an interesting use of multimedia. Of the women that we had profiled, all identified as white, but there were a number of people who assumed that they were black because of their idioms and accents. One of my colleagues asked, “How does it feel as a white person documenting black women?”—a question that’s very valid, but that also revealed that my colleage had made some assumptions linking class, race, and language in very specific ways. We had a great discussion about it, actually.

The appropriation of voice is something that I am very conscious of in writing these pieces. I felt like I had to be very conscious of staying true to what Dana, Billie Jean, and D.J. would say and be sensitive about how they might want to be represented. The feedback that we’ve gotten from them is pretty much “Yeah, that’s about right.” I’m hoping that we did a good, sensitive job, but it’s something that we all worry about. When you’re doing something with people who are in a relatively less empowered position than you are, you have to think about those questions or you’re not doing your job.

I think that we were women profiling with women in a community where there is a profound absence of men (because the men were in prison or had just skidaddled) was important to the project. Now, that’s not to say that I think a male could not engage with this work but that it would be somewhat different.

EF: So does the poet have an obligation to the subject? How is this similar or different from the photographer’s?

SSW: Of course, but the kind of obligationdepends on the poet and the photographer. One of the things that we discovered through this project—this project was really hard to do because so many different moving parts—we discovered we had different creative projects and ways to get work done. Personally, I learned a lot about audio production. I learned a lot about Brenda’s visual and technical processes and different approaches that have to do with the kinds of artists that we are. I needed more reflection and time to observe in a silent manner. I knew that I needed more time than I had to hole up and write. Lu’s process is about seducing you to say the right thing to get the radio piece to work in a coherent way. It’s about being around people, and talking, talking, talking, pulling it out of the interviewee. Brenda--her process is different. She crosses more lines than most documenters would cross by giving somebody five dollars for gas or a ride here and there because she’s a member of that community, because she’s an insider and that determines how anyone would approach it. And I think that’s OK too. The question of insider/outsider may be the more important question about how to approach the documentary work than whether you are a poet or photographer.

EF: So how is it different for the insider versus the outsider?

SSW: I’m thinking of Brenda getting embroiled in all the drama, their fistfights and all of their mama drama. There’s a lot of baby mama drama, or, as Billie Jean would say, “baby mother and baby father drama.” She’s very proper about that, which ended up being part of my poem. Billie Jean called it that, so that’s why it’s in there.

I’m thinking about [the insider/outsider question] in contrast to Brenda’s photographs, which are very stark and tell a specific message. I wanted to complement that vision, but I wanted to represent moments where these women did feel empowered. My goal is not to contradict but to enrich and complicate the singular vision of the photograph. I think the piece of Billy Jean at the Flag Day parade, the “Just a Girl” poem, is a step in that direction. There was one night we piled into D.J.’s minivan and went to Schenectady, NY and they got all dressed up in their tight pants and g-strings. We had a good time. We had a girl’s night out. Brenda photographed that, and it made it into the poem, photos of that evening when we went out to the club. There’s a picture of D.J. dancing, and my back’s to the camera.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: Do you consider these pieces to be ekphrastic? You’ve made ekphrasis part of your work elsewhere. How does this process compare with other ekphrastics you’ve done, ex. for the Landmarks program and the Blanton Museum's Poetry Project?

SSW: I’ve automatically assumed that they are but not in the traditional way, as in, “Here’s a piece of visual art. I’m going to represent it in my poem.” It’s a different kind of take because we were working collaboratively and we were creating our respective works of art at the same time. So, some of it is ekphrastic. Some of it, yes, in the more traditional sense. For instance, there were three or four images, that I had already seen. Some of them ended up in the poem or references to them. Lu tends to represent this approach as a new way of storytelling, but it’s a new take on ekphrasis, too. The visual art pre-exists the poems, but some of them are being created at the same time. Some of the photos are taken afterwards. I think the possibility to call it ekphrasis is definitely there but not wholly in the traditional sense. I am interested in pushing the envelope in what the process of ekphrasis means.

Plato talks about ekphrasis as involving one representation in art and then a second ideal representation of that representation in literature, and then a third ideal representation, ad infinitum--basically an infinite regress of mirrors. But here we’re asking, “What happens when those representations are parallel, when they are being created in parallel forms in parallel time? What prism of ekphrastic perspective can emerge through collaboration? And can it be more than merely mimetic?”

One of the ways that I want to complicate and trouble ekphrasis is to add reflection on process—on creation as well as representation. Thinking about that parallelism between poetry and photograph rather than having a linear distance between them helps to do that. “Women of Troy” is as much about photography and representation as it is about these particular women. The last few lines, “You are the city and its women/wailing darkly and bright to bless/your city as it burns, this city/made of your light” is of course Troy burning--but it is also the city being populated by Brenda’s photographs, the light and dark of her film and its reproduction.

The way that poem is organized—it’s a litany. It’s image after image. Not all of the lines correspond one to one to a photograph, but it’s like being in a gallery of photographs. I wanted the effect of walking through a gallery and to emphasize the way the city speaks to a viewer through this collection of images.

And that’s what I think poetry and photography share, the language of image, and that’s why there’s such a venerable tradition of the two working together. At the same time, there are a lot of unexplored avenues in working in those two artistic genres. With ekphrasis, I feel like I’ve stumbled upon the great metaphor that will inform most of my writing. I could write a lifetime of work about image and representation.

Screen shot, "Women of Troy" via vimeo

EF: Aside from ekphrasis, these pieces seem to touch the borders of other forms. I’m thinking elegy, ode. They also form a sort of archive.

SSW: We definitely took it as a documentary project and certainly what Brenda is doing is archiving these women’s lives. A big goal of her Upstate Girls project is to basically follow these women and their daughters through growing up as children and then becoming mothers themselves. She wants to see one generational turn, and she’s not that far away from it, actually.

EF: You’ve probably noticed that many of my questions deal with characterizing the form of this piece. I find that the complicated form pays tribute to the lives of these women, in a way. Did you find that, in order to pay full tribute to these women’s experiences, it was necessary to use multiple forms?

SSW: I don’t think it’s necessary. I think you can pay tribute in whatever genre, whatever artistic mode. However, I think the fact that we did undertake a multifaceted, complex mode that reached many artistic modes and genres, we made it a better documentary project because you could have a conversation of women on the radio that you couldn’t have anywhere else. You could have my poem and Billie Jean talking right back to each other. I could add a counter-anchor to Brenda’s photos to show empowerment as well as moments of strife and struggle.

I don’t think my poems would be as strong as they are if they were not running alongside the work of my collaborators, Lu and Brenda. Can you pay tribute in single genres? Of course, and they do. But, they speak so much more powerfully in concert.

EF: I know you’re also interested in orality, aurality, and the role of the performance. Do you view these videos or photograph/ video combos as a kind of performance?

SSW: Oh lordy! Well, let me tell you a story. I was living in Austin the summer I was writing these poems, and so Lu arranged for me to go to the KUT studio on the UT campus to record my poems. We spent a four-hour, marathon session recording four or five poems that she would then edit down. I have a background in doing performance poetry on slam stages, so I got ready for it. I rehearsed and practiced reading the poems aloud and got it so that they would sound good on the radio. Then I got into the studio, and Lu had hired an audio editor, Emily Botein, to help her with the project. She and Emily were on the phone, and I would say three lines, and then they would say, “Make this sound less like poetry. You’re reading this too much like a poet.” It was so frustrating! But, in a good way. We had this marathon session, trying to get me to sound less like a poet. It was pretty hilarious, and it was frustrating at the time, but looking back on it, it was really funny. It was because they were approaching it from a very expert position of being producers creating a radio narrative that worked from start to finish. I didn’t know at the time that Lu was thinking of inter-splicing women’s interviews with my own voice. It had to be a very specific delivery. I think they were trying to erase my voice of any affect, which is hard for a poet, even someone as down-to-earth as me. When you have a certain line break or slant rhyme, you have an unconscious desire as a poet to highlight it, I guess.

When Lu put together the multimedia piece, I had already recorded “Women of Troy.” She tried and tried to make my audio work, but something wasn’t clicking. So Lu asked Brenda--who hails from that area and sounds like those women--to read and record the poem. When you hear the piece, it’s Brenda’s voice you hear, and I think it works. I didn’t quite know how to feel about it at first. I felt a little bit of ownership of the piece, but once I played it and sat with it, I realized it was the right choice. I think poets and really all of us have an attachment—maybe it’s the cult of the author era that we are in—to the idea that the author has some ultimate authority over the work. You think you know what it’s supposed to sound like or mean, and this was an instance where that boundary was crossed and challenged for the better.

I learned that—surprise!--someone else can do a better job than me with my own work. The collaboration opened me up to more possibilities for how the poem can sound--the way I think about it may not be the best way. It was a very, very good lesson to learn.

Visibility, Physicality, and Size Acceptance: Substantia Jones of the Adipositivity Project

ladysquires — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:59:15 +0000

(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.

Welcome to our blog, Substantia, and thank you for taking the time to talk with me. What role do you think images play in shaping our acceptance of different bodies and what role do you see your own work playing?

It's my pleasure, and thank you for your interest.

Images are as important in creating body acceptance as they are in creating body shame. My view of the role I play has changed over time. My original goal was widespread bombardment of fat-positive images, in hopes of changing mainstream minds, super-double-reverse-Clockwork-Orange style. Instead it's become something that has more of an impact on the subject, than on the mainstream. But increasingly I'm hearing from those who occupy the lower end of the size spectrum. Some revolutions are slow and steady. But no less effective.

While so many people have found your photography inspirational and life affirming, I imagine it would be a bit terrifying to appear in them, especially since, as you say on your website, these are regular people, not models. How do you develop a rapport with your subjects and encourage them to reveal themselves in such vulnerable (though compelling) ways?

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.

In your early photographs, the faces of your subjects are almost always concealed, and you had a very specific point to make with that choice. I've noticed that you include a lot more faces in your most recent work. Why the change?

Lately I've been interested in capturing how a fat person exists in their environment. Going faceless in that situation would make it appear that I've removed something which belongs in the image. That's not what I do. I'm perhaps also influenced by the fact that increasingly, Adiposers want their faces to be included. I still love the close-up detail shots, though. They'll never go away.

The choice to conceal faces always struck me as interesting given the "headless fattie" phenomenon in journalism about dieting and obesity. Those photographs, which usually just feature a disembodied stomach always seemed to be encouraging viewers to dehumanize fat bodies while simultaneously encouraging them to think "that could be me" and feel subsequent shame. Do you see yourself as subverting or playing off of that convention?

A disembodied stomach in a grease-stained T-shirt, no less. And usually moving much more slowly than those around them. Never do they show a fat belly bouncing along on a bike or a ball field. That wouldn't support the alarmist junk science they're purveying.

While it's a kick to co-opt the format and repurpose it to promote fat acceptance, I've never thought of it as particularly subversive. In fact, I believe it's among the least subversive things I do, perhaps because it wasn't the biggest motivator in my decision to put the observer's eyes on the vessel, rather than its contents. Subverting media's use of the grease-stained belly is certainly in the mix, but it's not among my top few reasons for doing it. It's primarily a creative choice, and one I think has been validated by the fact that Charlotte Cooper, the fierce London activist whom it's said first coined the term "headless fatty," has posed for The Adipositivity Project. More than once.

Though almost all of your photographs are nudes (or feature the subjects in "revealing" clothing), your erotic photographs, particularly the 2011 Valentines Day series, are particularly striking. Do you see those photographs as particularly subversive? Why do you think it is important to portray fat people as (healthy) sexual beings?

Love and sex are as important to the wellbeing of fat folks as they are to those of smaller size, and displays of such commonalities are important humanization tools. Both groups need to see more of them. Everyone wants to see their lives represented in media. Fat people's lives include love and sex, yet while the largest percentage of entertainment is about love and sex, rarely are the subjects fat. I'd really like to knock a few dents into that paradigm. Plus, it's hot.

Not only do you feature a variety of body sizes and types, you seem to take care to feature women of all races, and I've been noticing more photographs of male bodies and of gay couples. What role do your photographs (and fat acceptance more generally) play in promoting diversity across a range of intersectionalities?

I wouldn't presume to be qualified to answer this with any accuracy, but I believe I understand (as much as is possible for a white, cisgendered hetero to understand) the reluctance to get involved in a campaign in which you don't see people who look like you already present. Factor in that if you're part of another marginalized population, your energies may be spent correcting injustices elsewhere. But one would hope that seeing one's self visually represented in a fat acceptance effort might encourage more queers, transfolk, people of color, the disabled, men, etc. to become a part of the movement. I think we can all learn from one another's struggles without it turning into the oppression Olympics. It's not a contest, and weight-based discrimination is most certainly not "the last accepted form of prejudice." Sorry, Oprah. It just isn't.

A Posterior for Posterity

Kimberly Singletary — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

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.

Temeca Freeman via GLCityMusic

Although the video, which has been edited as more than 4 different stories with at least two different reporters, is dubbed into German, one doesn’t need German to visually devour Freeman; the camera eye acts as lingua franca. Freeman’s portrayal is reminiscent of the treatment of Sarah Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, a Khoikhoi woman made into a one-woman traveling show, in part, for her large bottom, in 19th Century Europe.

When Freeman goes to her first massage, for example, one reporter tells us, “Here we come, the first time, in the enjoyment of [Freeman’s] curves. Everything’s real, claims the Po Model.” Note that our visual enjoyment of seeing Freeman on the massage table is more important than her enjoyment of a massage; the statement also throws into doubt Freeman’s claims about her naturalness. We, the presumably majority white, male German audience, are given authority over Freeman’s body to verify or reject her claim. In another video, the white, male masseuse is asked verify her claims.

Freeman’s story also featured clips from an earlier story about U.S. butt model Nicole “Coco” Austin; the stories were spliced together as if in conjunction, highlighting stark differences in how white, blonde Austin, was portrayed compared to Freeman. Freeman wistfully outlines her dream of being world renowned, and the camera jumps to Austin who stresses that hoping without work ethic isn’t enough. (Austin's advice: we can't all be scientists: some of us have to work at McDonald's) Austin is identified as a butt model and internet millionaire, while Freeman, “wants to make a career with her butt,” – despite having notoriety enough to be backstage at Fashion Week.

These women and their backsides represent American excess, but they’re not presented as equally excessive. Austin’s beauty is verified through her financial success, though Freeman’s bum, the reporter notes, is 4 centimeters larger than Austin’s. Apparently, it’s not the size of the butt but the beauty of the butt’s owner which determines success.

Double exoticization is at the heart of this German story, whereby mythical America, represented as New York’s hopefulness or the cynical, hardened sexiness of Hollywood is paired with an invitation to stare at racial difference, to see exactly what it is about black women that makes them so (un)sexy, (ab)normal, (freakishly) desirable. The Pro7 stories use the butt to re-center white women as the standard of beauty, to bestow rights of ownership to white males to speak for black women, and to Other the black body.

Nicole "Coco" Austin via Coco's World

To see "Trend Mega-Hintern," one of the versions of the stories featuring both Freeman and Austin, please click here. (NOTE: This video is apparently only visible in Germany.)

Bodies of Evidence

EmilyBloom — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:16:14 +0000

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.

These photo collections led me to consider representations of obesity in other media and, particularly, the cropped photographs that feature so regularly on local nightly new programs. Why is it that obesity is so often represented by a headless body? Although the obvious answer is to protect the identity of these individuals, such images paint an eerily dehumanized portrait of obesity. The obesity debate has created a strange visual rhetoric that photographic montages such as The Museum of Fat and “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” may be attempting to reorient.

Image Credit: MSNBC

In a recent article in Slate Magazine, "Glutton Intolerance," Daniel Engber argues that social stigmas against overweight individuals are not only deplorable but may actually cause the health problems associated with obesity. Citing a study by epidemiologist Peter Muennig, Engber writes that weight discrimination contributes to the stress-related illnesses that are generally attributed to obesity. If weight-stigma is itself a public health “epidemic” then perhaps visual evidence for active, well-loved plus-size people may perform an important function in undermining stigmas and, thereby, relieving dangerous stress.

Photo-retouching guru

John Jones — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:24:30 +0000

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

John Jones — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:11:59 +0000

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