viz. - children

Coloring 9/11

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:25:08 +0000

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

It didn’t take long for a media storm to emerge around Really Big Coloring Books new title We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids' Book of Freedom. It was quickly and roundly criticized for its heavy-handed portrayal of Muslims. In the face of these criticisms Wayne Bell, the publisher at Really Big Coloring Books, has steadfastly argued that the book only shows the truth of what happened. It’s fairly clear though that the book slips easily into the popular narrative of freedom-hating-Muslims attacking freedom-loving-Americans because they hate our freedom. We Shall Never Forget isn’t an especially smart piece of propaganda, though. The play between the large amount of text and the inconsistent images make it hard to pin down how, exactly, its message is delivered.

In a video on their website Really Big Coloring Books reminds us that this is a pedagogical tool. And as such first we have to ask who the intended audience is. Who exactly is this book supposed to be teaching? 9/11 happened 10 years ago. I don't believe that it's unfair to state that almost anyone that can actually remember the day has outgrown coloring books. Unlike the ill-received coloring book Something Scary Happened, put together in 2003 by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team, We Will Never Forget is ultimately intended for an audience that cannot forget in the first place because there is nothing to remember. So perhaps the audience then isn't necessarily children along but parents with young children. As such, it might be best to look at We Will Never Forget 9/11 as a textual and visual history book geared towards parents looking to teach their children a particular 9/11 history.

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

One of the more interesting aspects of this page is the extreme dissonance it presents itself with. Many of the images in this coloring book are created in a kind of realist style. There is an attention to detail that might require a colored pencil rather than the standard crayon. The bin Ladin kill shot, though, looks thoroughly cartoonish. The subject matter, though, is anything but. Coloring books are no strangers to violence. There are plenty of books featuring superheroes fighting villains in standard comic style. You'll often find the two foes frozen in mid-punch. What isn't so common, though, is the level of immediate violence presented here. This is, of course, compounded by the fact that this book attempts to present actual events rather than imaginations.

We are presented with somewhat more than a final showdown between Osama bin Ladin and the men that ultimately killed him. The first thing a viewer will notice is the armed SEAL staring down his rifle at bid Ladin and his wife. This isn't an unfamiliar image, especially to anyone who remembers the Elián González debacle in the late 90s. And while there are only so many different ways to display an armed man aiming at two unarmed people I can't help but draw a connection between the two images. Their image is, to a degree, undermined by the broad cultural memory of their audience--parents with young children. At this point it isn't too terribly different from the above mentioned super hero books. You've got the valiant hero about to take out the cartoonish bad guy. But we're not looking at a standoff.

(Image Credit: Alan Diaz)

This isn't the Elián González picture. Instead what we're seeing is the bullet as it flied toward bin Ladin, as he hides behind his wife (this human shield narrative, though, was almost immediately backed away from by the White House). So that in the end, when the full image is taken in, we're privy to not only violence, but imminent death wrapped in the worst kind of cartoon veneer all while the coloring book editorializes the event and instructs children to "ask your mother and father, your teacher, your preacher what it really means. What does it mean to be Free? Why are we a FREE people?"

(Image Credit: We Shall Never Forget 9/11)

The level of text in this book is pretty curious. It almost makes it hard to imagine exactly how this whole thing functions. Is there a combined action where the kid furiously colors burning towers while their parent plows through the text? Perhaps first they sit down to read through it--although the text is clearly directed at children as they are frequently asked to ask their parents about various issues--then, with the story in their memory they color things in. In the end it feels like this book was less intended for any real practical use and more that it is just an attempt (a successful attempt--this has been Really Big Coloring Books fasted selling book ever) at cashing in on the 9/11 anniversary with a clumsily delivered political message.

P.S. While looking for images of We Shall Never forget I stumbled across many from the above mentioned A Scary Thing happened. This one offers a particularly nice commentary on 9/11 media coverage.

(Image Credit: Something Scary Happened)

Fast Food Morality

Michael Widner — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Image via Fast Food FAILS Ads vs Reality

Appetizing, right? This image comes from one of several websites devoted to examining the differences between fast food as-advertised and as-is. These sites make the same argument: the ads promise fresh, attractive food, but what you get when you buy it fulfills the worst fears of the fast-food consumer. These photographs are the equivalent of showing how images of cover models are photoshopped for magazines. They imply that the companies who push such disappointing food are dishonest cheats.

The distortions of ads ties into a larger complex of concerns surrounding the marketing and consumption of fast food. San Fransisco, for instance, recently banned McDonald's from selling its Happy Meals to protect children ("Won't somebody think of the children?") from the pernicious effects of the toy-waving, high calorie junk food. The toy always rides on other heavily-marketed children's fare, mostly movies. The accumulated force is, many argue, too much for kids or parents to withstand. The child-consumer, like the adult duped by unrealistic ads, is a mindless, uncritical consumer of media and food, drawn in by doodads, bright colors, and that clown. Our mission, then, should be to teach the young how to parse marketing.

Picture of a McDonald's Happy Meal via "The War on Happiness: Leave Happy Meals Alone", The Atlantic

Screenshot of happymeal.com

Instead, we shame them. As other viz bloggers have noted (see Bodies of Evidence, Bodies vs Behavior: The Problems with Childhood Obesity Campaigns, and Lee Price and Exposed Eating), conversations about eating and ways to combat obesity often impute some moral defect to the subjects because of their bodies. The obese, such arguments go, blindly follow the dictates of ads and yet also rational agents whom we should blame for their unhealthy bodies. Even if PSAs don't verbally blame and shame the child, images of fat kids are held up for warning and mockery. Commentary often vocally does blame the parents for their moral failings and poor parenting.

Image via McDonalds Sued Over Happy Meals

The sarcasm from the Mitchieville blog encapsulates this judgement:

McDonald’s really does make it hard to say no to my legitimate children. I’ve tried feeding them food straight from the fridge, but apparently kids’ don’t like ice cubes and mustard for dinner. So then my kids’ catch a McDonald’s commercial on the tube – the same tube they had been watching for 10 straight hours – and they start up with their blathering nonsense about how they would love a hamburger and fries.

Parents who give in to their childrens' demands for Happy Meals are the same neglectful parents who plop their tots in front of the tv 10 hours a day, yet another moral failure.

The link between body and morality is not limited to children and fast food, however, as the Christian Diet movement shows:

Globe cover via Miss Plump Universenet

Several recent books imply that obesity is not only unhealthy, but a sin (e.g., Dieting for God and I Prayed Myself Slim). The correspondence between body and soul is easy and clear. If you do good works (i.e., eat healthy and exercise), your body will reflect it. If you sin by giving in to the deceiver and overeat, your "crime" will out as fat.

But like the habits these ideologies attack, the equivalence of body with soul is temporarily satisfying, ultimately unhealthy, and too convenient.

Where Children Sleep - James Mollison's Diptychs

Michael Widner — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:37:26 +0000

All images by James Mollison, in Where Children Sleep, downloaded from VisualNews.com

This photograph is part of James Mollison's book Where Children Sleep, which features 56 similar diptychs and is, as Mollison states, an attempt to engage with children's rights via an inclusive vision of the diversity of places children sleep. Mollison intended the book for children aged 9-13. He states that he wanted to photograph each child away from where he or she sleeps and in front of a neutral background to show them "as equals, just as children." The variety of sleeping places (the simple inability to write "bedrooms" is, itself, telling) are, Mollison notes, "inscribed with the children's material and cultural circumstances."

I can easily imagine multiple pedagogical uses for these arresting photographs. For the target audience, what better way to get children to contemplate socioeconomic diversity than through comparison with something they no doubt have never given much though to? By grounding the lesson in something as intimate as where one sleeps, with the attendant expression of identity common to bedrooms, the photographs carry great emotional power. There are examples of excess and predominantly one-note identities:

There are also images of povery like the opening image for this post:

Although Mollison notes that he wants the children to stand as equals before the neutral background, I'm not convinced he succeeds. The traces of their material and cultural embeddedness are never fully erased. Clothes, tools, bags, jewelry, and other accoutrements invariably mark each child. Rather than a shocking discongruity, the two images in each diptych seem, for the most part, to fit. Each child appears removed from her or his environment, but not essentially separate from it. Does this visual continuity between child and sleeping place represent a failure on the artist's part or the impossibility of the task?

"Trick or Treat, Smell my Feet..."

Andi — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:28:36 +0000

H/T: The New York Times

I found that I just couldn't resist finding some possible posting that connects to Halloween and it didn't take me long to stumble across an article in the New York Times that focuses on grade school guidelines for appropriate costumes. Apparently several elementary and secondary schools across the county are urging (or requiring) students to limit their choice of costume to selections that are not scary, not offensive, not violent. While it seems completely understandable to restrict students from wearing costumes that rely on offensive stereotypes, I wonder where these schools draw the line on what exactly is appropriate. Restricting children's costumes raises several provocative questions: is Halloween a tradition that does/should celebrate horror? Are children already exposed to too many violent images (in other words, is a zombie scarier than Grand Theft Auto)? What should be the role of the parent in policing appropriate costumes? the role of the school in policing appropriate dress?

The article includes the details of a memo circulated by Riverside Elementary School in Southern California elaborating on the parameters for costumes including "no costume should depict gangs or horror characters, or be scary" "no weapons, even fake ones" and "no fake fingernails." This memo also suggested that no costume should be demeaning with respect to race, nationality, gender, or ability. Now prohibiting fake fingernails seems less obvious to me, and I can't begin to know how exactly "scary" will be defined, but restricting costumes that are demeaning seems a no-brainer. A quick scan of the collection of children's costumes online yields many ridiculous choices.

Screen capture: HalloweenCostumes4Kids.com

The first website I looked at has an "Indian Running Bull" costume for young boys and Princess Jasmine from Disney's Aladdin for girls. These costumes certainly have the Disney-esque about them but many scholars and critics have slammed Disney for its demeaning depictions of race, ethnicity, gender. These costumes are not "scary" but I wonder whether we would really categorize them as "positive" (a costume characteristic called for by several Texas schools). Are young children remaking themselves in the image of their favorite television character any less "scary" than ghosts, goblins, or ghouls?

Progression or Perpetuation?

Sarah Wagner — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:44:52 +0000

An organization called Casey Family Programs has produced several new ads about foster care that have shown up on television and the sides of buses here in the Austin area.

The website for the campaign is here: "Raisemeup.org"

The campaign highlights the possible futures facing children in the foster care system, futures which include high rates of homelessness, PTSD, and crime. The hook is that you "don't have to raise a child to raise them up"--that is, there are many ways to give these kids help besides fostering and adopting.

This is certainly true--there is so much that needs to be done to help these kids face the often insurmountable obstacles, and the efforts of the Casey Family Programs to get more people more involved can only help. But in a conversation with a woman who has lived through the foster care system, we debated whether these ads help progress our attitudes about foster kids, or perpetuate stereotypes of these kids as "problems".

It's not that they aren't troubled, who wouldn't be? Many kids, especially older ones, go through multiple placements. The woman I know remembers 11 homes; there may have been more. If you're not adopted, at age 18, you're done. No more homes, no more case workers providing even minimal continuity. This kid with little knowledge of functioning relationships, who's spent the past several years with no family, is told to get a job and make it work. So high rates of homelessness and crime are to be expected.

This very, very simplified account is some of the background that we don't see in the ads. And I'm not convinced all viewers need to see it. But those who have only a passing concern for this issue (I understand everyone has priorities) only see that one image: foster kid = societal problem. Is that enough to get people involved?

The call is coming from inside the House!

Jillian Sayre — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 17:53:14 +0000

Check out a new political ad from the Clinton campaign:

I almost didn't want to be the one to blog about this one, because we've got some pretty rich material here. My favorite thing about this piece, though, is that it reminds me of the old Babysitter horror stories we used to/still tell ourselves. It really puts the domestic in domestic threat.