viz. - photography

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

Walter Benjamin on photography and film

Laura Thain — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 08:14:16 +0000

To wrap up our semester on viz., our staff showcases new static content we've added to our "teaching" and "visual theory" sections. Below is my discussion of Walter Benjamin's canonical essay on photography, film, and the politics of mass media, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Each day this week, we'll feature a new piece of static content on our blog. We hope instructors, students, and persons interested in visual rhetoric will browse our archives (linked in the top bar) and find useful material for research, pedagogy, and all forms of intellectual inquiry.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. 1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Reprint ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. 217–52.

By Laura Thain

In this seminal essay, originally published in French in 1936, Benjamin outlines shifts in the way art produces meaning after the advent of the photograph. His essay takes places in fifteen parts, which explore how film is physically produced, how that production influences the way that audiences interact with film, and how those audiences reconcile film with their pre-existing value structures and beliefs. Benjamin ultimately suggests a method of reading photography and film that accounts for both their material production and how that material production supersedes or alters prior methods of criticism. Central to critical practice in the age of mechanical reproduction is the establishment of critical distance between audience and media form, so that the audience can resist pure enjoyment and instead ask how photography and film can help us see differently, even as they attempts to perfectly replicate the way we already perceive the world. Writing from Paris, Benjamin, a Jewish German expatriate disturbed by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, explores the political implications of new, mechanized art forms in a rapidly-changing 20th century.

I. “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. “

Benjamin begins by outlining a history of artistic reproduction. Even the ancient Greeks had technologies to reproduce art, like founding and stamping. The principle difference between earlier forms of reproduction and photography, argues Benjamin, is speed. Photography, which allowed the artist to create with his eye rather than his hands, eventually developed into moving picture able to contain speech. This is the point from we might begin to consider mechanical reproduction an artistic form in its own right, rather than a way to reproduce pre-existing art forms.

II. “The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”

Before photography, a piece of art’s authenticity resided in the original copy. This is because the original work of art occupies a particular time and space, handed down from person to person since its creation, bearing evidence of its own provenance. Any copy that comes after an original work of art was a “forgery” of the original, and therefore, practically worthless.

Art created via mechanical reproduction doesn’t fit into this old model for two reasons. We can’t call the scene captured on film the “original” like we can do with a painting, because the camera lens creates art from its subject matter—the subject matter alone is not art. In this way, the camera can even surpass what the eye sees in the original scene, because the lens can see slower, faster, or closer than the human eye under the right adjustments. Secondly, mechanically reproduced art does not occupy a single time or space like a painting does. Photography and sound recording are forms of telecommunication because they allow us to see and hear things from a different time and place.

Because mechanically-reproduced art has no claim to authenticity by means of singularity or originality, Benjamin posits it loses some of its connection or essence. He coins the term “aura” to encompass that which the painting has but the photograph lacks—the aura is all the contexts a thing gathers since its inception. Photographs, by contrast, exist in multiple places simultaneously, and each viewer experiences them within a distinct and separate context. No longer can we trace a provenance of photography. Thus, we lose the artistic object’s relationship with tradition.

III. “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope.“

Benjamin talks here about the relationship between human senses and the media that humans use to communicate those senses. The way we perceive and process information has two causes: “natural” and “historical.” Our natural way of sensing is biological and grows with us innately. But our historical way of seeing is shaped by our culture—but the modes of art we understand and become familiar with. Benjamin claims that classical cultures did not realize this distinction, but wiser now and more modern, we might.

The tension between natural and historical sense is also the tension between experiencing something and seeing it represented in a mechanical representation. He uses the example of a mountain vista. We like the idea of seeing mountains on a warm summer day, and because we seek the “aura” of the real experience, we consume endlessly reproductions of it in photographs and magazines. And because the public desires equality and accessibility in the industrial age, photographic representations of the mountain become a more stable reality than the mountain itself. But the photograph can never have the aura of the original experience.

IV. “…for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.“

Art’s function, Benjamin argues, is historically tied up with ritual, and ritual depends on the existence of an original, authentic piece of art. Even though the same piece of art might get tied up in several different rituals over time, ritual remained an important way that viewers made sense of art. However, as mechanical reproduction increased, artists needed to find new justifications for art outside of ritual—“art for art’s sake.” This attitude toward art denied that art had any social function.

This is the biggest hint that art in the age of mechanical reproduction has an even clearer social function than ever before. Freed of “parasitic” ritual (in which the piece of art is the authority), art was now free to be a form of communication built from new contexts and orders. Art was produced not for ritual then, but for reproduction. In this sense, art can only be political when it breaks free from the “aura,” and this process is only possible via mechanical reproduction.

V. “Works of art are received and valued on different planes.”

While works of art in the past were the center of ritual and therefore were primarily of “cult” value, mechanical works of art are the center of exhibition. When works are created for ritual, they function as a type of magic and can only be recognized as art over time. However, when works are created to be exhibited, they are considered works of art from the start.

VI. “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.”

Benjamin recounts a brief history of photography. The first popular photographs were portraits that allowed loved ones to become cult objects, especially after their death. However, soon, photographs became visual evidence of certain places at certain times. Soon, people need captions for photographs to tell them what they are seeing. Rather than being cult objects, photographs become new centers of meaning; therefore, they take on special political significance.

VII. “Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised.”

Benjamin discusses how photography made possible a language of pictures that “transformed the entire nature of art,” and uses this section to transition into a discussion of film as a new site of artistic meaning.

VIII. “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.”

Benjamin dissects the difference between a stage actor’s performance and a screen actor’s performance. The film actor performs differently than the stage actor because his audience is not present, putting them in a position of “critic” rather than spectator. The camera forces the perspective and position of the audience, and this becomes a crucial tool in establishing the relationship between actor and audience in the medium of film. Because the audience’s perspective is fixed by the camera’s lens, there is no possibility for the kind of “cult value” Benjamin ascribes to earlier forms of art and portrait photography.

IX. “[W]hat matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else.”

While the stage actor constructs the narrative of the play, the camera constructs the narrative of a film. Disparate moments are reassembled by mechanical means to tell a story, sometimes beyond the intentions of the film actor. The film actor, then, is prized for his realism and the extent to which he can successfully provide the self-performance necessary to the film’s narrative. The camera fragments and disrupts the actor’s “aura” through mechanical reproduction, replacing the presence of the actor with the presence of the camera. This presents a new space for artistic reproduction similar to that which Benjamin ascribes to the photograph. No longer must audiences believe in the reality of performance to understand that performance as artistic—now, audiences can celebrate the performance as constructed, and judge its artistic value based on that construction.

X. “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.”

Benjamin discusses the politics of labor involved in filmed performance. Through the technology of film, the actor is able to translate his “mirror” image to the public, but this aura-less reproduction is a mere commodity to which the actor has no more connection than a factor worker to the products of his labor. To replace the aura, film studios construct “cults of personality” which attempt to hide the film’s status as a commodity. While film has revolutionary potential, the material conditions of its production in Western Europe limit its political value.

Film also has the potential to make its audience its stars. Like other forms of mass media that precede it, specifically, print journalism, newsreels offer every day audiences the potential for filmic representation. In addition, film audiences feel, like sports fans, compelled to critic and comment on the thing they watch, which makes them feel like participants in the film’s creation of meaning. For this reason, Benjamin argues, the line between reader and writer in the 20^th century has become considerably blurred. There is enormous power embedded in an audience’s conception of themselves as co-authors of film, and for this reason, the film industry relies on spectacle and distraction to neutralize film’s revolutionary potential.

XI. “The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

Benjamin further elaborates on film’s creation of spectacle. He explains that a spectator watching the process of filming (rather than the film itself) could only avoid seeing the tools of film production by looking through the lens of the camera itself. Otherwise, being present during filming means seeing the tools of film production all around you. This is a major difference between stage and screen that we might take a sign that technology has finally brought about its own invisibility.

Benjamin reads this phenomenon in terms of rhetorical distance. He contrasts painting and film using the analogy of the magician vs. the painter. The magician increases critical distance to perform his magical healing, whereas the surgeon closes the critical distance between himself and his patient by literally penetrating his body. Painting also relies on mysticism and distance to create aesthetic value. Film, on the other hand, closes the distance between the real and the imaginary so completely that the imaginary appears real.

XII. “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”

Benjamin now turns to a discussion of the implications of mass production to popular culture. Paintings, he argues, could not have a mass audience because they could not be reproduced and publicly viewed. But because films are manufactured via reproduction, we must consider how the mass public reads these objects. Benjamin asserts that the public “uncritically enjoys” the conventional—the thing they are used to and familiar with—and responds with “aversion” to anything new.

XIII. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

Benjamin implicitly asks his reader to reject and resist the “uncritical enjoyment” of conventional film and instead look at how we can use this new technology to perform new kinds of critiques. Because the technology allows us to rewind, revist, slow down, or speed up action, sound, and experience, we can use the film to “see” as we’ve never seen before. Just as psychoanalysis asks us to think about and articulate the unthought and the unspoken, film asks us to see the unseen.

XIV. “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.”

Benjamin argues demands for new forms of artistic expression predate the development of film, and that this is a pattern we can trace throughout history. Artistic expression always demands more than technology can provide. In fact, art can be seen to push technological developments as it provides the ideological context for them. Art understands that new media eventually become normalized, and so art always strives to push the available means of technology beyond its present capabilities.

XV. “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”

Benjamin concludes by asking the public to consciously understand the processes by which they view film and “apperceive” or make sense of the film in terms of their pre-existing beliefs. This, according to his larger argument, is what a larger method of film criticism should consider. The chief danger of film is its ability to hypnotize its audience into acceptance via its hyperrealism. Public attention to and interest in how a film constructs narrative, reality, time, and movement is necessary if film is to accomplish its revolutionary potential.

Further reading

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919).

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964).

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (2000).

The Most Democratic Selfie?

Sarah G. Sussman — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 20:35:11 +0000

Image Source: eonline

"By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" -Baudelaire

After last week’s Oscar’s ceremony, a number of critics lauded Ellen DeGeneres’s performance as “warm,” "accessible,” and most interestingly, “democratic.” The gimmick, of course, which earned her the most attention was the big Oscar’s Selfie. After all, what could be more charming than everyone’s favorite celebrities acting like ordinary people; seemingly thrilled at the mere chance to be on television? Thinking about this selfie, and the comment that Ellen was so “democratic” brought to mind the oft touted expression that photography is “the great democratic medium.” In an interesting way, the Oscar’s Selfie is the perfect encapsulation of that saying.

The original reason for referring to photography as the democratic medium was because it blurred the class lines between the haves and have-nots. By today’s standards, where democratic photography means publishing photos of high stakes life and death revolutions on Facebook and other forms of social media, that might sound tame. But in the nineteenth century – the camera was a revolutionary tool in its own right, as it paved the way for a more empowered polity by contributing to the erasure between high and low culture.

By way of example of this tension, take Baudelaire’s famous polemic against photography and the plebeian masses from 1859, “In these deplorable times,” Baudelaire warned, “a new industry has developed,”

"An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah . . . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers" (Baudelaire 296).

It was also fittingly, a revolution which, from the start, was affiliated with acting. In a quote that is, by today’s standards, bemusing and irate, Baudelaire raves about ordinary people re-enacting scenes from history:

"Strange abominations manifested themselves. By bringing together and posing a pack of rascals, male and female, dressed up like carnival-time butchers and washerwomen, and in persuading these ‘heroes’ to ‘hold’ their improvised grimaces for as long as the photographic process required, people really believed they could represent the tragic and the charming scenes of history" (Baudelaire 296). For Baudelaire, re-enacting the scenes of history was best left to master painters with proper training, not any "washerwoman" with access to a camera.

In the nineteenth century, photographs were often used for the purpose Baudelaire describes: to re-create scenes from the past. Perhaps we see the same impulse in our modern cinema being used to recreate the past. But to be clear, Baudelaire’s objection is not against all acting. It’s against the democratic masses “any rascals” or “washerwomen” believing that they, too, could represent the “tragic and the charming scenes of history” without the proper training, without the proper sanctified feeling of high-class stage actors. A sanctioned high art operation like the academy is not what’s under fire here. As Baudelaire continues, the actor is still “sublime.”

"Some democratic writer must have seen in that a cheap means of spreading the dislike of history and painting amongst the masses, thus committing a double sacrilege, and insulting, at one and the same time, the divine art of painting and the sublime art of the actor. It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite[i]" (Baudelaire 296).

It’s easy to see why members of the academy want to be in league with that wily democratic writer instead of the elite stage actor; why the stereoscope, an inexpensive and popular parlor amusement which was an early form of cinema, seems the cooler, more American side of history to be on. But don’t the members of our Oscar’s Selfie (like Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt, etc.) have a closer kinship to the celebrated “high culture” actors of the stage? So really, how democratic is Ellen’s performance and her Oscar’s Selfie?

The selfie wasn’t this year’s Oscar’s only attempt at seeming democratic. Nearly all of the skits and jokes from this year's ceremony showed a preoccupation with the erasure between high and low culture; an erasure most often performed through social media. Take Jimmy Fallon’s opening sketch, where he visits a “troll” tweeter who is insulting actress’s dresses. After zapping into her living room, he grabs her hand and the camera zooms to her fingers for extra effect. In a mock interrogation he asks that random everywoman with disdain: “what’s on your nails? Cheetos?” Then there’s the world’s luckiest pizza delivery guy sketch, where “one of us” gets plucked out of obscurity (and tipped graciously).

But why bother with all of these social media and everyman stand ins? Is it possible that our stars are afraid of losing fans to the more democratic enertainment forms on social media? Or do they pretend to be, so as to appear more like us? It’s a loop. Photography’s democratic promise has always been galvanized by a populist threat. With the photograph, one didn’t need a painter for a portrait, and eventually, people could make their own art. The selfie is the latest revolution in that vein: an instant portrait of the self one can take hundreds of at a moment– but could we ever be our own celebrities? And do we like the selfie because it’s that carrot at the end of the stick? It promises us that maybe, someday, we too could breathe that rarefied air.

Ellen and Jennifer Lawrence are two stars who have made a career out of this circular relationship between fame and us “ordinary people.” Midway through the show, Ellen shows that she’s a fan too (just like us!), when she fangirlishly pockets Lupita’s Nyong’o’s lip balm while collecting tips for the man who will only be known as The Pizza Guy. Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence tripped (again!) on her way in, and everyone loved her all the more for it, because it was the kind of mistake "real" people would make.

Morever, the selfie in question offers catharsis by showing gracious and glamorous people in a very ordinary scramble for affection and popularity (poor Jared Leto was cropped out). The Simpson’s Oscar Selfie spoof is humorous because of this: it shows the underdog homer, being trampled underfoot. And then there’s the playful reminders that Luptia Nyong’o’s brother, Peter Nyong’o, is “just a college kid” who got into the shot. On the Ellen show this was a cue for uproarious laughter, as Ellen notes that Lupita, the recognized Hollywood star, is left in the back, but . . wait, why is that funny? Because, like the pizza guy, Ellen is implying that Peter Nyong'o is an everyman who doesn’t belong, but celebrities welcome him anyway (just for the designated Warholian 15 minutes that social media provides). Aha, right. So again, how democratic is it, really?

Still it’s impossible to escape the elephant in the room: that the Oscar’s was sponsored by Samsung Galaxy, and that all of these selfies were intermittently interrupted by commercials for the same phone that Ellen kept waving around. There are those who will say that it’s just grandstanding to say that photography is the democratic medium in light of a celebrity photo op like this; that some can’t afford a camera. Whatever the case, it does seem nice that the re-tweets inspired Samsung to give $3 million divided evenly between St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and The Humane Society of the United States. But what I find most interesting is the charitable message of the photo: that you, too, can be famous. And if that's the case, are we a step closer to completely decentralizing the old system of celebrity culture, anyway?

[i] Charles Baudelaire. Trans. P.E. Charvat. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1972.) Print.

“Walking in the Footsteps of Edward Sheriff Curtis”: Jimmy Nelson’s Before They Pass Away

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 21:01:57 +0000

Image credit: beforethey.com

In my last post I wrote about viral internet photo collections of people from around the world with their possessions. Perhaps because of these photos, or perhaps because of a general cultural zeitgeist, another much older genre of ethnographic portraiture has been receiving renewed attention on the web: portraiture of “tribespeople” from around the world. The most prominent series in the revival of this genre seems to be Before They Pass Away, a long-term project from British-born photographer Jimmy Nelson.

Nelson’s absolutely stunning images feature 15 million people from 29 tribes on five continents. On Nelson’s website, he describes himself as a “photographer of indigenous people,” having begun his life’s work in 1987 photographing the people of Tibet. According to the project website, Before They Pass Away is the product of a long term effort to capture the “natural authenticity” of these tribes. “The purity of humanity exists,” the website tells us. “Jimmy Nelson found the last tribesmen and observed them. He smiled and drank their mysterious brews before taking out his camera. He shared what real people share: vibrations, invisible but palpable.” Throughout Nelson’s site, one finds a rhetoric of essentialism not unlike that present in Edward Steichen’s Family of Man. (For more on that, see my previous post in which I also discuss Barthes’ critique of that same essentialism in his essay “The Great Family of Man”.)

Nelson’s ultimate goal, to create “an ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world,” brings to mind an even older body of work: Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian (1907-1930). In purporting to document a “disappearing” world, Nelson is directly engaging with the propaganda of the Vanishing Indian, which was popularized by Curtis’ work.

In the foreword to The North American Indian, Volume 1, Theodore Roosevelt writes,

“Our generation offers the last chance for doing what Mr. Curtis has done. The Indian as he has hitherto been is on the point of passing away. His life has been lived under conditions through which our own race passed so many ages ago that not a vestige of their memory remains. It would be a veritable calamity if a vivid and truthful record of these conditions was not kept.”

The persistent trope of the Vanishing Indian perpetuated violence and genocide in the Americas by perpetuating the myth that the struggle over land, rights, and sovereignty was over. Today, how has the trope of the Vanishing Indian been reinterpreted and expanded by Nelson?

Both Nelson and Curtis place indigenous cultures within the folds of Western European culture. Where Roosevelt referred to American Indians as a sort of time-capsule (still in an epoch which “our own race passed”), Nelson side-steps that teleology by favoring a more general connection --“if they pass away, a part of ourselves will too,” the website says. In Curtis’ book, statements of common humanity seem deployed to infer that the consequences of modernization are tragic, but ultimately beneficent. In Nelson’s case, however, we see a pluralism of a more 21^st century variety. Nelson’s essentialism seems deployed to infer that people who rely heavily on natural resources are being “pushed out” of their way of life and their very existence by forces such as global warming. Where Curtis has been read by some as an apologist for genocide, Nelson’s “vanishing tribespeople” might be read as part of a warning against the increasing ripples of eco-catastrophes we’ve been witnessing in recent years.

The comparison of the two photographers is of course complex, and this post is only intended as a jumping off point for a more nuanced discussion.

Documentation of Loss – Observing Failure in the Modern Olympics

Laura Thain — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:17:50 +0000

Olympic fencer Shin A-Lam of South Korea remains in the arena to contest an unfavorable ruling without the expected stoicism. Image credit: Korea Bang

What does it mean to document loss? What is its rhetorical function? Rhetoric of Celebrity student Iva Kinnaird assembles an archive of defeat from several Olympic games, tracing the intersections of celebrity and sportsmanship. The documentation of loss, she asserts, commodifies defeat and makes it available for public consumption. The result is a strange rhetorical landscape where the lines between winning and losing become less easy to determine.

“The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

- Pierre de Coubertin, Father of the modern Olympic Games

Photo Finish

With athletes seemingly nearing the uppermost limits of a performance asymptote, it is necessary to improve technology to measure these near indiscernible differences. When one hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and silver, the cameras must be able to record that highly precise moment.

Image Source: Openwaterpedia

Photographs tend to resist abstraction, non-figuration. Photography is unique in its ability to capture the image of something realistically. It can mechanically or exactly record things without the influence of a human bias, although man’s interpretation of said image is another story.

Voyeurism

Image Source: Undisputed Legal

Cameras measure success through the information that they record. With a broader definition how that can be measured, it could be said that an athlete’s strength in character (despite their athletic performance) is what makes them successful.

The emotional nature of some events has “raised spectator voyeurism to an uncomfortable level” (Williams). The viewers want to relate on an emotional level, and that involves seeing the joy or, in many cases, the disappointment in the eyes of the competitors. The close proximity of the cameras is a simple formal way of placing the viewer in the middle of the action, allowing them to more easily feel the weight of any given emotion.

Beautiful Losers

Image Source: Variations on Normal

The trend of honoring dramatic losses and idolizing athletes who lose heroically has not gone unnoticed.

A proposed fourth podium for “when an athlete is either extremely rubbish or gets an injury, but still finishes the race” seems to be an idea that is already metaphorically taking place (Wilcox). It is an occurrence which seems to elicit support from the crowd despite their differences in nationality.

Image Source: Ameblo

Derek Redman, a frontrunner in the 400m sprint at the 1992 Barcelona games is now famously an icon for perseverance and who defines “the essence of the human and Olympic spirit.” Despite coming in last, he provided the public with one of those moments that “remind us what the Olympics are all about” (Barcelona).

This is a problematic situation where the public has turned his devastation into an inspirational moment, denying him agency in the process. His heartbreaking loss is now our Visa commercial.

From a viewer’s perspective, limping across the finish line was a show of his grace in defeat. Interviews with Redmond reveal a different reason for his struggle: his “belief that if he limped fast enough he might still overtake four people and qualify for the final.” (Burnton). It was not heroic strength in character that drove him; it was his delusion acting as a shield from despair.

There is a noble thought that elevating these moments will act as some sort of consolation prize, but what it is really doing is trapping the athlete in that moment by limiting the public’s perception within the confines of a single memorable event. This stagnant image prevents them from moving on.

The video of the race on YouTube sentimentalizes the moment right up to the point of being mawkish. As if the raw footage of a man’s crushed dreams is not enough to convey the heartbreak of the moment, Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” is overlaid.

The footage is edited to elicit sympathy and admiration towards Derek. The video of the race is interlaid with text explaining each moment of the travesty. At the end the text reads “When you don’t give up, YOU CANNOT FAIL!” (Warning). This slogan, of course, is completely illogical; a person is perfectly capable of failing just as many times as they try*[1]. The inspirational message is understood nonetheless. The result of all this is a contrived sappy documentation skewing the memory of the event (Brackets).

When losing is losing

Image Source: Postgrad Problems

Winners who lose - McKayla

McKayla Maroney was the obvious favorite to win the gold in the vault competition. She was expected to win by a wide margin. But when it came down to her actual performance on the day, she faltered. Even in her failure we have elevated her to fame. She is famous for being disappointed with her medal. “She’s so good that she’s probably the only one who doesn’t even have to perform to win the gold” (Macur). An audience can become accustomed to an athlete’s high performance when they are consistently exceptional. Viewed individually, they would all be spectacular, but when seen one after the other they become desensitized to the awesomeness of their capabilities. We expect them to win by exceptional standards. It all goes back to a person’s expectations for their performance relative to others. As was the case with Maroney, one's expectations may be so high that anything less than gold becomes unimpressive.

When winning is losing

Image Source: Fit Sugar

One of the most famous moments in the modern history of gymnastics is Kerri Strug’s 1996 Vault. The defining moment of her career came down to her performing a gold winning vault with an injured leg. The moment of victory was replayed in a countdown of the “30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments” (Brackets). We are given these stories in the format of a countdown which attempts to quantify the weight of an emotional connection. The video documenting the event plays up Kerri’s struggle and the victory that it earns her and her country. The darker reality that is seldom talked about in relation to this moment is the implications of the injury Strug incurred. She snagged the gold in the team final but was unable to compete in her individual event.

It is replayed as a victory for the American team, and it was, in a way, but it was also a crushing defeat for the athlete on an individual level. At the bottom of the video “Due to her injury, Kerri Strug was unable to compete in the individual all-around competition and event finals, despite having qualified for both.” Once again, inspirational music is overlaid. With both this video and the Derek Redmond clip, the moment is sentimentalized to mask the disparity between what occurred to the athlete and the way an audience wishes to perceive that occurrence.

When losing is winning (maybe) - Badminton

Image Source: Yahoo! Sports

The Greeks aspired to win for the sake of eternal glory. “They were also given all manner of material rewards by the cities they represented, but the original goal was to establish everlasting fame on earth, the sure route to immortality” (Williams). In this case, competing well in their sport consequently proving their athleticism was the way to remain in the public’s consciousness. Now, with different modes of achieving longevity in the public eye through celebrity, there are different, less straightforward, ways of being remembered. This begs the question - do you have to win in your event if the goal is to be remembered? The answer, given the current climate of celebrity culture: of course not. People are remembered for anything seen as being an outlier in the traditional winner narrative. One major qualifier to the winner’s narrative is the basic requirement that they must win.

In the scandalous badminton tournament placement match which the Chinese and South Korean women’s teams both ‘threw’, the players became infamous for their strategy of losing. What infuriated viewers most was not that they lost, but that they did so without even trying to conceal their intent. It is rare for blatant misconduct to occur at this level, and “in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” (Belson). The misconduct is “complicated by the fact that the rules of the sport seemed to give the athletes an incentive to lose” (Belson). Although the teams were disqualified for their actions, they achieved something that no other badminton teams ever have. They created a story interesting enough to live on in the memory of the viewer. The commentator said of the strategy during the match, “This, I’m very sorry to say, could be one of the biggest news stories of the games so far” The YouTube replays of the match in question revealed it was eighteen times as popular as the video of the final match in which determined the gold medalist. By the Greek standards of what is implicit with victory, it is arguable that, although the players lost, they still reached an early goal of the games, and therefore won. The idea of victory and of failure is relative and dependent on what makes up one’s own personal goals.

With the increasing capabilities to deliver information to an audience, there is a focus on reactions to loss and the sportsmanship that goes along with it. The myth of how an athlete won or lost overshadows their results. The Olympics has become not just about winning or losing--it is more about how that win or loss is recorded and repeated back to an audience .

[1] This is dependent on a person’s definition of failure. A quick Google dictionary search brings the result “lack of success” is broad enough to allow their use to be true.

Works Cited

"Barcelona 1992 ." Derek Anthony Redmond. Olympic.org, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Belson, Ken. "Olympic Ideal Takes Beating In Badminton." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Aug. 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Brackets, Joe. "30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments." N.p., 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Burnton, Simon. "50 Stunning Olympic Moments No3: Derek Redmond and Dad Finish 400m." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 May 0030. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Macur, Juliet. "American Slips at the Finish, Losing Her Grip on the Gold." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

"Pierre De Coubertin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

WARNING: You Will Cry While Watching This. Perf. Derek Redmond and Josh Groban. YouTube. YouTube, 22 May 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Wilcox, Dominic. "Beautiful Losers." Variations on Normal. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Williams, Gregory. "Better Luck Next Time." Cabinet Summer 2002: n. pag. Cabinet Magazine. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.

Texans as Ethnographic Subjects

Sarah G. Sussman — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 15:33:21 +0000

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

Recently one of my students came to class carrying a large mass of ribbons. With a central bow the size of a large sunflower, and gold and white strands trailing for several feet, it resembled a festive octopus. “I’m making fonts for my design class out of mums,” she explained, as she pulled out a chair for her artwork. The class then conferred the knowledge of the Texas tradition that is mum giving.

Mums are a homecoming dance tradition. The term originates from Chrysanthemum, but the mums worn by young Texans are all prize-winning-chrysanthemum big -- about the diameter of a basketball or larger. They can become very elaborate: some are filled with LED lights, others play music, and they can retail for several hundred dollars. The men’s much more modest version is called a garter. That night, another friend of mine who had also been schooled by their students on mums serendipitously posted an article to Facebook which featured internationally acclaimed photographer Nancy Newberry’s photo series, MUM – and my education on mum giving continued.

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

Newberry, who is a Texan, describes herself as someone “interested in the strange rituals of everyday life,” she is fascinated in particular by the lore of her home state. Reinforcing her ethos as the art-world savvy Texan, she playfully says she can be found “chasing tumbleweeds between Dallas and Marfa.” MUM, a tableau centered on the custom of mum giving, has been featured in international publications like The Guardian and Raw magazine. In an interview for Raw magazine, Newberry says, “viewing the photograph encourages a certain amount of discourse adding to the broader discussion on gift exchange.” With her talk of “the broader discussion of gift exchange” Newberry implies that rather than the cultures, which the Boasian model of anthropology gave scholars in the 1890s, we have Culture, in the monolithic sense – that all cultures may be measured equally, that all gift-giving is somehow the same – perhaps Newberry views mum giving as part of a global economy, as globalization theorists might. Nevertheless, her use of a camera to answer these questions, and her description of them as “strange,” puts her in the alienated station of an outside observer; as a part of an older ethnographic tradition.

From the project and interviews, it seems pretty transparent: Newberry’s Mum is a study of Texans as ethnographic subjects. Since my class is currently studying ethnography and photography, I brought the series in to find out exactly what rural Texans (I’d say that generally 1/3 of my students are from small towns, and 2/3 are from suburbs of Dallas or Houston) had to say about this ethnographic study of their own peer group. Flipping through the images, the students looked like they were being put on. Some laughed uncomfortably. Others cringingly added, “Oh, that’s just awful.” When asked if they would like to be photographed in this way, 100% of them agreed, they would not.

Image Credit: NancyNewberry.com

The photos have something of The Virgin Suicides about them. In one, a young man waits with bad posture, slumped on a hotel bed, a torn, shiny, cheap curtain behind him. He is seemingly waiting for that anti-climactic, post-dance de-flowering moment that so much of Coppola’s film revolves around. In another, a girl stands staring into a swimming pool fully clothed – it’s pretty transparent code for “verge of a nervous breakdown.” I get it, I guess. Being a teenager is difficult and weird, and far more psychologically complex than anyone acknowledges. But ethnographic depictions of rural people and ethnographic depictions of teenagers share a problem: even if the artist came from Texas, or was once a teenager, they have forgotten both, or the experience has crystallized in such a way as to make any sort of objective study impossible, and Newberry does claim to be capturing their culture, not her own memories of youth, or her own memories of Texas.

The images are haunting and beautiful, but I can’t shake the sense that they are all carefully curated to exude an (at this point clichéd) sense of desolation and depression. There seems an opportunity lost in posing subjects in the shape of such a narrative, when one might instead try to experience that narrative with them, or offer them a platform for expressing it themselves.

In a follow up post to this one, I will step further into the history of rural Americans as ethnographic subjects.

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor: The Impoverished Viewer

clsloan — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 13:55:34 +0000

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor features photographs of the impoverished tenants of a San Fransisco hotel and of an affluent group of select individuals, also shown in their homes. As the most obvious dimension of the title suggests, the photos serve as a comparative essay on class and the disparity of wealth in America. Goldberg compiled this collection through the late 70s and early 80s and it was originally published by Random House in 1985. The Harry Ransom Center's current exhibit, Radical Transformation: Magnum Photos into the Digital Age (September 10, 2013 – January 5, 2014), includes several images from Rich and Poor.

As I walked through the exhibit, alternately admiring the pieces and feeling guilty for not knowing enough about photography to be properly appreciative, Goldberg's work in particular caught my eye. The composition of these pieces is, in and of itself, visually striking: a black-and-white photo is surrounded by white space marked with heavy, black, handwritten text. The presence of text has interesting implications for meaning as well. As I read through the testimonies attached to the images, I found myself compelled to think about the ethics of photojournalism and the limits of visual media. My encounter with each piece unfolded dynamically, and reading the text after carefully taking in the images led me to reflect on my role as detached observer with no little amount of distaste. For instance, while I closely examined the image of the piece signed “T.J,” my geared-for-interpretation-brain zeroed in on the woman's not-quite-sexy pose, the tilt of her head, the flatness of her stare, the bed as the only other notable feature in the frame.

Image Credit: Magnum Photos

I cobbled together something about female sexuality and kept idly wondering whether this picture was trying to challenge norms or partake of them while I read through the text. It says, “To me Life seems so messed up But lilttel by lilttel i am trying to over come that. Because it is hard being a woman and to accept me as I am. T.J.” This visceral commentary caused me to be immediately overcome with the insufficiency of any interpretation I could possibly bring to bear on this photo. The model herself, with her intimate, affective link to the creation of this image, to the experiences the photo gestures towards, to the reasons behind the tilt of the head, the pose, the bed, had already asserted an incredibly rich analysis of this image, and any others paled in comparison. All of a sudden, Rich and Poor acquired new, media-oriented dimensions for me. The richness of the images grew poor against the force of the models' statements. The poverty of my own understanding as a viewer came into harsh relief.

Of course, this striking experience itself was carefully tailored by Goldberg, with the help of his models. I have yet to read through Rich and Poor, but, from what I've gleaned off the internet, I understand that the statements on the photos were hand-chosen by Goldberg, and the authenticity of the handwriting, suggestive of a spontaneous overflow of emotion, itself is an artistic technique. However, Goldberg's collection still asks viewers to examine their own privilege and think hard about both financial and artistic exploitation.

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

Commercial and Cooperative Subjectivities: Does an Independent Lens See Differently?

Laura Thain — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 15:09:05 +0000

Image Credit: Hudson Valley Almanac

"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."--Robert Capa, founding member of Magnum. d. 1954, landmine accident

Currently on exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center is a carefully curated selection of Magnum photos, drawing from the organization’s archive housed at the Center. Magnum, an elite professional photographic cooperative, brings together some of the world’s premiere photographers in a collaboration resistant to the commercial demands of photojournalism. This week on viz., we’ll feature the exhibit and explore issues central to visual argumentation and mass media. This post will explore what possibilities arise when photographers become their own producers and distributors—what influence do the conditions of production have on the genre of photojournalism itself?

AUDIENCE Many photojournalists speak of the “poster effect”—a bold, central image and a clean, contrasting background. The “poster effect” assumes a disinterested, distracted audience who must be coaxed into viewing the image amidst a complex matrix of visual competition. Below is an example of the "poster" effect. This image, taken by DC freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, was used by Shepard Fairey (without permission) in the iconic Obama HOPE poster.

Image Credit: The Online Photographer

The Magnum photos arguably make different assumptions about a general audience—at the heart of the organization's ethos is the belief that people are interested in the depiction of human experiences and events. Reading this audience in good faith, a condition which is possible only when we remove photography from its commercialized context, opens up artistic possibilities. Below, Inge Morath plays with the convention of "poster" photography by including a posed photograph alongside a boy cobbling shoes in Iran.

Image Credit: Perceptive Travel

I was struck by how seldom Magnum photographs relied on the conventions of high art to communicate their message. Instead, I observed tactics that subtly drew attention to photography as a medium rather than as an unmediated experience. These compositional techniques showed respect for a mass audience and assumed they wanted more than a photograph that exactly replicated experience. Rather, these photographs meditate on what it means to capture an experience at all.

From Henri Cartier-Bresson's series The Great Leap Foward. Image Credit: Personal Photograph.

COMPOSITION These photographs often resist the “poster effect” and instead include jarring edges, multiple centers of movement, and background that resists its position vis a vis the foreground. Below, Burt Glen plays with photographic convention to depict integration in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

TECHNIQUE Rather than creating “true-to-life” images, the Magnum photographs are often interested in using the camera lens to see beyond the naked eye. In so doing, they often highlight the limits of both the camera and of visual memory. Below, Erich Hartmann photographs data output of an IBM voice recognition study in an attempt to visualize sound.

Image Credit: Personal Photograph

MEDIATION Unconventional cropping, composition, and photographic technique bring attention to the photograph as a medium, rather than a transparent window into experience. They challenge the idea that photography represents memory and suggest that our cognition, rather, has shifted with the advent of photography. While commercial photojournalism often capitalizes on the relationship between human memory and photography, presenting photography as an artifact of memory an therefore memory available for consumption, the Magnum photos challenge the assumptions underpinning “photorealism” (that is, that a painting of a photograph is as close to the real scene as a painting of the scene itself). By daring to bring attention to the medium of photography itself, the Magnum photos seem to suggest that the photographic has altered our perception of memory, rather than the other way around.

Below, Paul Fusco depicts Robert Kennedy's funeral train by using an unconventional f-stop setting to depict the movement of the train.

Image Credit: Agnostica

THE PERSISTANCE OF THE COMMERCIAL Despite all the ways in which the Magnum photos resist the conventions and assumptions of commercial photojournalism, the commercial persists. Magnum's experiments in the digital acknowledge competitition from new media as a driving inspirational force. And human experience itself cannot, of course, avoid the commercial as a formative part of cultural experience. Magnum photos often play with commercial conventions in order to make subtle statements through the photographic medium itself. For instance, Muhammad Ali's fist here is the real celebrity. Its owner is merely relegated to the background.

Image Credit: Roberta Cucchario

We hope you will enjoy the rest of the week's post on the Ransom Center's exhibition and offer us your own thoughts about the intersections between photography, visual rhetoric, and the digital age.

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

David Maisel and Beautiful Disasters

Calliope — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:28:40 +0000

American Mine (Carlin, NV 1), 2007

Image Credit: David Maisel

You must be thinking, "Gosh, that's marvelous! What is it?" Well, I'll give you some hints about what it's not. It's not a computer-generated image (so you can rule out "digital vat of candy for a Willy Wonka film"). And it wasn't captured by NASA on a trip to Neptune. If you guessed geode, then you're getting warmer, but you're still way off in terms of scale. Perhaps it looks to you like a place where a leprechaun might stash his gold? Well, strangely, that guess may be closest of all.

It turns out this absolutely mesmerizing photograph by David Maisel is an aerial view of a toxic manmade pond in Carlin Trend, Nevada, "the most prolific gold mining district in the Western Hemisphere" according to Maisel's website. The disorienting quality of the photo is a hallmark of Maisel's environmental photography, which explores the visually haunting, otherworldly transformations humans inflict on the Earth's surface. For decades, Maisel has been flying over and photographing sites of environmental wreckage, like the scored and chemically soaked basins of America's pit mines or the wasted lakebeds that once supplied Los Angeles with water. Beyond increasing awareness about these environmental disasters, Maisel's photographs enact a terrifying tug-of-war between ethics and aesthetics. As viewers experience and take pleasure in their sublime beauty, they are forced into the uncomfortable knowledge that these environmentally ruinous conditions have an irresistably attractive dimension.

The Lake Project 13

Image Credit: David Maisel

My good friend and fellow graduate student Michael Roberts introduced me to David Maisel via the Smithsonian's recent blog about the photographer's new retrospective collection, Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime. The beauty that Maisel locates in sites of terrestrial destruction--in the curves of a withered, polluted river or a network of cracks in the parched earth--instantly reminded me of the dilemma philosopher Elaine Scarry explores in her work on beauty and justice. Scarry argues that far from diverting critical attention from injustice, or masking it, beauty incites us to cherish and protect life. It seems to me that Maisel's photographs push the limits of this theory by positing the majesty and allure of catastrophic environmental wounds. If the very evidence of environmental devastation is made to look beautiful then what will compel us to save these endangered places?

It's difficult to articulate exactly how Maisel's photographs make me feel; but I can say that I don't feel complacence. Perhaps because most of the landscapes paradoxically appear beautiful while revealing signs of trauma, or a kind of pain, they allow us to consider both sensations in our minds at once. Maisel's photographs poignantly capture the dignity and beauty of the Earth even when it's under duress. And what could be more pathetic than that?

Image Credit: Jerry Ting

Maisel's work will remind anyone who has flown over the country of the strange views they've seen out the window. Personally, I think of the colored geometric pools that greet incoming planes at the San Francisco airport. I always enjoy looking at these lily-pad-like fields of water, but never knew what they were until Maisel's photos prompted me to investigate. It turns out these colored pools are industrial salt ponds, one-hundred-year-old evaporating receptacles for harvesting sea salt. They get their coloration from algae and other organisms living within them that express different colors depending on the saline levels in the pool. Though they are a historic part of the South Bay and make for a beautiful spectacle from overhead (see the image captured by an airplane passenger above) the salt ponds pose a major disturbance to the natural wetland habitat that preexisted them.

Image Credit: Save the Bay Blog

In 2003, California and federal agencies reclaimed a huge area of the shoreline for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project which aims to return these altered sections of shoreline to a more natural state. The effects of this project are already visible from a bird's-eye vantage (as the photo juxtaposition above illustrates). In a weird way, the SF Salt Pond Restoration Project feels like an "undoing" of the beauty Maisel's photographs cull out of industrial landscapes. But surely we shouldn't lament the strides these dedicated environmentalists have made towards renewing the wetlands habitat, even if they mean that the South Bay will lose its landmark look. Some will prefer the aesthetic and/or nostalgic value of the "before" shot to the "after" shot despite what their conscience tells them. But the tension between our aesthetic preferences and our ethical gut isn't something we should necessarily suppress. At least that's what Maisel's photographs seem to suggest.

Sources of Fame: Photographer or Subject?

Laura Thain — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:47:13 +0000

An Arnold Newman "selfie" from 1987. Image credit: The Jewish Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition on Arnold Newman is the way it resists chronology. Newman’s photographs are organizes by particular attention to one of ten elements of Newman’s photography as artistic practice: “searches,” “choices,” “fronts,” “geometries,” “habitats,” “lumen,” “rhythms,” “sensibilities,” “signatures,” and “weavings.” What results is an exhibit that resists a notion of Arnold Newman’s transformation over time. Instead, the exhibit suggests, audiences might read Newman by his unique manipulation of photography’s formal elements throughout his entire career.

The resistance to chronology is apparent, too, in the weaving, wandering nature of the physical exhibit. Temporary half-walls throughout the exhibition space designate no beginning or end point for audiences. Instead, the exhibit inspires audiences to accept Newman’s particular artistic practice across ten themes as definitive criteria for photographic excellence, and therefore evidence for celebrating the photographer himself.

Such a construction has encouraged me to think about the relationship between celebrated photographer and celebrated subject. Are there ways that these two categories inform each other in the case of Arnold Newman? Can we trace, even amidst the Harry Ransom Center’s achronological curation, a chronological shift in fame from photographer to photographed? How does fame work as a mechanism for those who garner fame by representing it and perhaps cultivating it? Can those who represent fame create it as well?

To accomplish such a task, I’d like to begin by examining some of Newman’s early portrait subjects. I’ve limited myself to what the Ransom Center has included in their exhibition in the exploration below. Each portrait contains a “fame ratio” rating, which I’ve calculated by dividing the amount of google hits the portrait subject and the search term “Arnold Newman” receive by the amount of google hits the portrait subject alone receives. The closer the fame ratio gets to one, the more, we might infer, that the fame of the portrait subject from a 2013 perspective depends on their portrayal by Arnold Newman.

Image Credit: Chris Beetles

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1941 [Fame ratio: .46]

[Google search results in 55,300 results]

[of those results, 25,600 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Without doing further archival research, I can say little about Kuniyoshi other than to assert he was an arguably minor figure in the New York art scene, especially in 1941, ten years after producing his most well-known works. Newman’s portrait of Kuniyoshi was probably mutually beneficial for Newman early in his career and Kuniyoshi late in his; now, evidence from Google suggests that Kuniyoshi is more reknowned for being Newman’s photographic subject than for his own innovating work in photography and lithography.

It is no coincidence that Newman was interested in Kuniyoshi; the two shared a similar interest in employing the naturalistic tradition in urban spaces.

Other portraits included from 1941:

Image Credit: iCollector

Raphael Soyer [Fame ratio: .22]

[Google search results in 77,500 results]

[of those results, 16,800 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Phillip Koch Paintings

Edward Hopper [fame ratio: .03]

[Google search results in 1.76 million results]

[of those results, 49,200 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Artnet

John French Sloan [Fame ratio: .02]

[Google search results in 300,000 results]

[of those results, 5,000 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

The trend of this data suggests that during 1941, Newman was able to establish a presence in the New York art community and transition from photographing minor figures to more major ones. However, the more famous the artist at the time Newman captured his photograph, the less their fame (present and future) depended upon their role as Newman’s photographic subject.

The exhibition also suggests that Newman’s 1941 photographs had a dramatic effect on the demand for his portraiture. Having achieved a reputation with his iconic 1941 photos, by 1942, Newman was no longer photographing minor figures. His subjects included arguably the most popular artists of the mid-century: Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.

Image Credit: Anthony Luke Photography

Marc Chagall, 1942 [Fame ratio: .01]

[Google search results in 4.2 million hits]

[of those hits, only 65,700 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Rice Cracker

Max Ernst, 1942 [Fame ratio: .004]

[Google search results in 2.34 million hits]

[of those hits, only 9,800 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

By 1946, Newman was photographing the likes of Igor Stravinsky (perhaps Newman’s most iconic photograph) and Gore Vidal; figures of such fame seem to indicate that Newman’s portraiture had, by the mid 1940s, become an emblem or indication of celebrity, rather than a component in the creation of celebrity for the photographic subject.

This is not to say that Newman lost interest in photographing people who did not enjoy mass fame. Over the course of his career, Newman continued to photograph subjects whom he thought were influential or significant to modern life. Not all of those figures were vindicated by the test of time.

I would like to close, however, by suggesting that Newman’s own work enjoys an iconic status in its own right, even when the significance of the photographic subject has been forgotten. (We might, for instance, return to my first example of Yasuo Kuniyoshi.) Newman often insisted that his photographs must speak as both textually (that is, technically) and contextually competent objects. This is how we might define “iconic” in the case of Newman. The object must communicate meaning both in its composition and in its subtext. As Newman argues, "Successful portraiture is like a three-legged stool. Kick out one leg and the whole thing collapses. In other words, visual ideas combined with technological control combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold its own." In this way, a viewer might experience the lesser-known figures of the Newman exhibit as a sort of “death of the subject” akin to Foucault’s “death of the author.” In relieving the subject as the primary element of a photograph, we might, in the case of Newman’s archive, let the photographer speak.

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

The Many Leaning Subjects of Arnold Newman

Calliope — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:39:51 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Porch and Chairs, West Palm Beach Florida, 1941

In between portraits of famous luminaries at the Harry Ransom Center's Arnold Newman Masterclass exhibit, there are a group of images from the photographer's early career that feel anonymous and private. They include pictures of landscapes, nameless figures, and modest structures--all subjects that seem to have been chosen for their compositional character rather than the associations they bring to mind. The above photograph from that period of a decontextualized porch and chairs resists our curiosity to see the whole house and place it in a particular setting, focusing us instead on form and line. The un-forthcomingness or formal starkness of this picture seems dramatically foreign to the photography of Newman's later career, the period of his well-known "environmental" portraits, which situated iconic individuals in settings that explained or extended their identities. (Rachel's post further glosses and complicates this term). Despite this, I'd like to point out some unifying threads between this quaint little study from West Palm Beach and a few, more recognizably Newmanian photographs, all of which are currently on display at the Ransom Center.

"Porch and Chairs" derives its charm from a few compositional elements. The first is the picture's close crop. Newman left a very small margin around the porch, especially to the right and left, which highlights its distorted shape. The lateral boards at the top of the photo give us the sense that Newman's camera is held level, but all of the lines one would expect to be vertical in the picture--the shutters, the right and left panels of the door frame, the porch's central support and the two cut-away walls--are slanted, making the structure appear unstable and droopy. Our eyes search the bowed and jagged siding for ninety degree angles to no avail. As much as they purport to be squares, the spaces within the porch frame are more like rhombuses that lean faintly to the left. Yet the tilted aspect of the porch doesn't overwhelm or unsettle the photo, because the two chairs in the lower right corner "lean" in the opposite direction. These backward-bending chairs may have no effect on structural soundness of the rickety building but they do provide the balance needed within the composition.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Pablo Picasso, painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Vallauris, France, 1954.

The crop planned here, which resulted in the famous Picasso portrait below, accomplishes something a little different from the "Porch and Chairs" framing. Newman begins with an image of a leaning subject, reorients it, and restores balance and energy to the painter's mien. Even after these modifications, there are still signs that he was leaning over in the original pose. The rightward pressure of Picasso's hand visible in the creases on his forehead offsets the positioning of the subject toward the left side of the frame. The hand, in other words, acts as a frame-within-a-frame that repositions and counterbalances the visual weight of the leaning subject.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Ernest Trova, Sculptor, Pace Gallery, 1971

Several other Newman portraits at the Harry Ransom Center feature leaning subjects and frames-within-frames. In this photograph of the sculptor Ernest Trova, for instance, the white jutting walls of the gallery (instead of Newman's red crayon) crop nearly half of his body from view, and what's left of Trova's trunk is pictured leaning against this "environmental" frame. We get the sense that the thrust of his lean is the only thing keeping him from being squeezed out of the picture.

Image Credit: www.mymodernmet.com

In this shot, Ansel Adams appears comfortably wedged between a beam and the frame of a sliding glass door. Behind him and inside his house a group of frames hang on the wall. The placement of the photographer in front of a pane of glass that, in turn, superimposes reflections of the trees outside on the framed artworks within the house suggests a communicability between each of these layers that may refer to Adams' work. Indeed, capturing the photographer, his beloved trees, and the art on his walls within the same bounding line suggests the inseparability of all of these things.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Joel Meyerowitz, photographer in his studio, New York, 1993

This final photograph of Joel Meyerowitz leaning against what must be the entry to his darkroom emboldens me to talk more directly about the importance of leaning and internal frames for Newman's work. From a compositional standpoint it seems to me that, like the tilted porch frame and the crooked-backed chairs of our first image, the lean and the frame of Newman's later pieces give them a crucial sense of counterpoise. In Newman's portraits of artists, these frame-like structures inevitably take on a more definite significance because of the inescapable relationship between artists and frames. Deliberately positioning these art makers within at least two sets of frames--the borders of Newman's photograph and what I've been calling its internal frame--emphasizes the fact that they have momentarily relinquished artistic control and have become art. Perhaps leaning or pushing back against the frame is the only way they can reassert a modicum of control.

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

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.

Arnold Newman's Photos...And Some Photos Thereof

james.wiedner — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:20:53 +0000

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

On February 12th, the traveling exhibition Arnold Newman: Masterclass began a four-month stop at UT’s esteemed Harry Ransom Center. As Newman was a prolific photographer with a strong belief in the instructional potential of photographs, the chance to see his life’s work first-hand was nothing short of spine-tingling to those of us with an unusually strong interest in visual culture and artifacts, especially when they have pedagogical implications! (Pretty dorky, I know.)

Newman’s artistic output is as extensive as it is brilliant. His photos of ordinary folks, as well as those of the rich and famous all seem to demonstrate Newman’s singular ability to capture what I would call “authenticity.” He managed to capture the humanness of his human subjects. Along with the fact that Newman enjoyed photographing subjects spontaneously (especially his subjects of the celebrity variety) and without preparation or posing, Newman’s photos all feel like they have about a hundred small nuances to them, the sum total of which were photographs that seemed…real. That is, accurate representations of individuals and localities as they truly were. He dismissed outright any assertions during his career that the ease with which one could take- and duplicate- a massive quantity of photographs somehow detracted from the legitimacy of any particular copy as the “authentic” (that word again) work product. I suppose one can only speculate as to what Newman’s opinion would have been towards an age where photographs can be duplicated infinitely and effortlessly, and where such photos can be endlessly edited by just about anyone.

Another reason viewing Newman’s photographs conveys the feeling that one is viewing people and places “as they really are” is the fact that Newman frequently took many shots of the same subject. For example, the exhibit contained a series of photographs of Marilyn Monroe, in which she appears to be making her way around a party. She seems oblivious to the fact that Newman is studying her, which is precisely how he manages to produce photographs that seem so revealing. The sequence of photos depict Marilyn with the smiling, charming look on her face for which she was known (and with which she is still equated), as she moves from conversation to conversation among various, anonymous, partygoers. In the middle of his string of shots showing Marilyn schmoozing are several amazing shots where she has found herself outside of the crowd. It is in those shots that Newman manages to capture a profound sadness in her face that the rest of the room never noticed. If you’ll excuse my bright orange reflection in the glass, you’ll see what I mean below:

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

Each of Newman's photographs is a work of art in itself. Additionally, taking the sequence in its totality- watching the transformation in the face of his subject- creates the feeling that you are viewing a truly authentic depiction of his subject(s). Again, I’ve had to rely on my own photos of photos to illustrate this posting, but hopefully the below gives some idea as to the way Newman would take a long sequence of photos of a single subject, later looking at them in their totality (the handwritten editing notes are his).

Image Credit: Photo from Arnold Newman Exhibit, Harry Ransom Center, taken by author; protected under Fair Use.

To end by talking about the photo I began with (all the way up top), I was amazed by some of the evidence of Newman’s life and personality external to any of the photography he left us. The picture at the top of this posting is part of a two-year section of a detailed calendar and record of every photo shoot Newman undertook during his career. He was meticulous in his record keeping, with his calendar always with him. For a guy with a career covering nearly seven decades, I found his bookkeeping skills nearly as impressive as his photography.

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

Photographs of the Willard Suitcases

Calliope — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:59:12 +0000

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

Beaten up, bulging, and with one latch ajar, this old suitcase beckons to be opened. It was closed for a long time, deposited with its owner in 1953 at the Willard Asylum for the Insane near Seneca Lake, NY. This and around 400 other suitcases that belonged to the asylum's patients sat for many years, forgotten in the attic of the defunct facility until discovered in the mid-1990s. After being exhibited publically for the first time in 2004, many of the suitcases are now temporarily in the care of Jon Crispin who has undertaken to photograph the collection. The images in this post are from Crispin's blog which chronicles his experience inspecting and documenting the personal effects of the Willard patients.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

On his blog, Crispin visually "unpacks" the suitcases for viewers, first presenting their tough-looking exteriors, then their inner compartments and finally, through close ups, individual items themselves. This photographic unveiling seems intended to simulate the experience of first discovering and opening the parcels (some of which date back to the 1920s). The open-face pictures have a luminous quality that evokes the revelatory experience of opening a present, or hoisting up the lid of an old costume box. Like beautiful clamshells, the suitcases cradle their contents in a visually striking way. Most are lined with fabric or pretty yellowed paper which gives the objects strewn inside them a personal, familiar, and strangely cheerful feel.

The paraphernalia radiate cheeriness in spite of, or almost in defiance of, the fate of institutional confinement that lurks behind each photograph. There are plenty of generic items in the cases, like hair combs and safety pins, but also stuff that has a very personal logic to it: biographically significant items that suggest the suitcase owners led full and interesting lives, at least before they were "put away." The case at the top of the page for instance belonged to a Ukrainian emigree who we know made a model of a church from his native country and gave it to President Truman. (The model was apparently impressive enough to find a home in a government building in Washington). The patient was also a prodigious painter while at Willard, which makes his collection of postcards, photos, prints and souvenirs of special interest. It is interesting to think of this case as an artistic wellspring, a physical container of ideas from the outside world that, at some point, might well have found their way into the patient's creations. More fascinating still is the notion that this artist's private suitcase has become, under Crispin's artistic supervision, a still life in its own right.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

This green suitcase, or sturdy trunk rather, belonged to a World War II veteran named Frank who was living in Brooklyn in 1945 when the police committed him to the psych wards for publically protesting a social slight. Even before I read about his tragic story, Frank's suitcase stood out to me because his possessions somehow make him seem knowable, even present. The miniature note books, the shipping tags, the posed photographs, and scraps brought back from serving overseas all suggest that he liked to thoughtfully record and remember experiences.

Frank's nostalgia, his comfortable air behind the camera, his propensity for self-portraiture and interest in memorabilia make him feel almost like a peer of ours, say, a person who would feel right at home using Instagram. But there's something eery about how close he feels to us. It's almost as if Frank, or whoever packed his suitcase, knew that it would become a time capsule of sorts, the only means through which future generations would get to know the handsome, dignified man in the photographs. I wish I could thank him for leaving us such a beautiful object-memoir of his life.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

Calliope — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:31:45 +0000

Image Credit: minted.com

Choosing a holiday card is apparently a big deal. I was not aware of this until my sister (married with two children) called me in distress over designing her card. As we talked and I pressed her to explain how this could possibly be stressful, I learned that the tradition of sending out greeting cards around the holidays isn't just about spreading good cheer. The rise of the photocard has made holiday salutations into an important opportunity for families to make a positive visual impression on friends and relatives. This surprised me a little because I had naively assumed the intent was to express one's hot-cocoa-induced feelings for the cards' recipients. But considering that media today is increasingly social, targeted, and customizable, the practice of creating a visual brand for one's family and sharing it with others should come as no surprise at all.

Image Credit: minted.com

What's interesting about the way this tradition has evolved is its correspondence to an emphasis on carefully mediated photography in popular social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). The photocard puts the family portrait front-and-center, replacing seasonal or religious iconography with family faces; and the photos that are included are often professionally taken, or at the very least posed, cropped, edited, and thoughtfully arranged. In my sister's circle of thirty-something friends, it's much more common to exchange customized photocards than store-bought cards with a candid snapshot thrown inside. Her friends use custom stationary sites like minted.com and tinyprints.com to create their distinct family look with carefully chosen photos and a prominent byline (see "The Jones Family 2012," and "The Laurants" above). Affixing the family name to a controlled, manufactured image of its members gives the card a corporate feel; the examples above could easily be ads for clothing stores (just replace "The Laurants" with Eddie Bauer or J. Crew).

These cards aren't very subtle about their aims. Their purpose is to construct a familial identity just as Facebook pages and online bios construct identities for individuals. The fact that they perform an authorized, identity-building function for families--groups as opposed to individuals--makes them fascinating and unique social objects. As I looked through pages of sample cards on the aforementioned sites, I tried to think of other widely-observed rituals or spaces in which families present carefully crafted images of themselves. Aside from engagement photos, and possibly birth announcements, which these photocards clearly draw upon, I could not think of many other occasions for publicly presenting a pre-fab image of the nuclear family. And then I remembered those stick figure families.

Image Credit: gorestruly.com

You know, the pictographic sticker-inventories of families displayed on the back of cars (see above). At first these bare representations might strike you as fundamentally different than the holiday photocards, which include a much more intimate portrait of the family. But I suspect that the decision to put these stickers on the back of one's car is related to the basic impulse behind the photocard: to advertise that you have a family, indicate its size, show that it is happy and thriving, and embrace group identity over individuality.

Image Credit: minted.com

Holiday cards that double as yearly newsletters seem to combine intimate presentations of the family with statements about their size, uniformity, group behavior. In the past, families might have sat down together during the holidays to write a long, usually humorous missive about what they experienced or accomplished that year. Now, sites like Minted encourage us to create and share infographics that measure our family's growth in stats and figures.

And now I will try my hardest not to leave you with an anti-commercialist, Grinch-like message, nor a moralizing one (even though these are two of my favorite postures). I will admit that after spending time on the virtual Hallmark aisle of our day, I can understand where my sister is coming from. Projecting an image of one's family is a delicate affair, and not an easy thing to opt out of. Almost any card, whether it's store-bought, handmade, digital, or photographic, will say something about how you want your family's values, traditions, class and lifestyle to be perceived. So choose wisely, and have a wonderful holiday season.

Image Database Review: NOAA Photo Library

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:05:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration traces its roots back to the oldest scientific agency in the United States: the Survey of the Coast established in 1807. Today's agency has a much broader purview, providing forecasts for the National Weather Service, maintaining orbiting satellites to monitor the Earth's climate, managing the nation's fisheries, and conducting scientific research. The database containing the photographic documentation of these varied activities provides the subject of this week's review.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

The web interface for the NOAA Photo Library is presented to the user through a basic html webpage. The entry screen displays an Image of the Day. The NOAA Photo Library organizes some its holdings with a number of Collections. The Collections are linked in a frame to the left of the screen. The site also provides a simple search box that the user accesses through a link on a line of menu tabs that run below the "NOAA Photo Library" banner. The search function permits the user to input one or more terms, but it provides no advanced keyword searching, limiting or sorting functions. The search function is provided through Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Photo by Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Staff

The NOAA Photo Library contains many images related to oceanic and atmospheric research. Some of the Collections include "America's Coastlines," "Weather Service," "Fisheries," and "Coral Kingdom." There are also some interesting surprises among its holdings, including the "Treasures of the Library" collection which includes images from texts dating back to the 15th century relating to the study of the oceans and climate and a collection of historic prints on the "Histories and Methods of Fisheries" documenting American fisheries in the late 19th century.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

While the search function is limited, many of the photos have extensive "category" tags, and those tags can be used in the search to locate related images. Many of the Collections include sub-categories organized in albums, providing another means to navigate the extensive number of images that reside on the database.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

One valuable aspect of the NOAA collection and any collection of imagery authored by a federal agency is the lack of copyright attached to the works. According to section 105 of the Copyright Act, "Copyright protection...is not available for any work of the United States Government." Agencies often attach some limitations to the images they release. For example, NOAA suggests that their images should primarily be used for education purposes and require that their images be credited "to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. Where a photographer is noted, please credit the photographer and his/her affiliated organization as well." Other agencies, such as NASA expressly prohibit using images in a way that suggests NASA commercially endorses a product or service. Outside of such requirements, however, images may be used freely.

Image Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce

Another strength of the Library is its inclusion of higher resolution images for many of the photos. In some cases, the original photos themselves were not high resolution images, so the higher resolution images provided on the website are of limited use, but for other images, such as photos of the historic book plates and more recent nature photography, the image quality is quite high.

Image Database Review: New York City Department of Records Online Image Gallery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 15:49:22 +0000

Image Credit: Joseph Shelderfer

During November and December I'll be devoting some blog posts to reviews of image archives recently added to the viz. "Images" resource page. First up is the gallery from the New York City Department of Records released in April 2012. The archive "provides free and open research access to over 800,000 items digitized from the Municipal Archives’ collections, including photographs, maps, motion-pictures and audio recordings." It is from the research perspective that I approach this review. Alan Taylor, at The Atlantic's photography blog In Focus, included some highlights he found while browsing the archive (warning: images include evidence photography from homicide crime scenes). Browsing through the images is certainly a good way to spend some time (perhaps too much time), but the archive is also organized through a series of collections that can help the viewer sift through the nearly one million images from the Big Apple.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Users access the archive through the LUNA interface, and can choose to either browse by collection or search by keyword. I'll discuss the search function after exploring the curated categories. LUNA provides embedding and linking function to help share the images users find in the archive. By signing up for an account, users can also use LUNA to create sideshow presentations. After clicking on the "Enter the Online Gallery" link, the user is presented with the LUNA interface. A sidebar on the left links to the collections, a center frame provides selected "featured" images, and a menu bar at the top of the interface links to the collections, sharing and presentation functions.

Image Credit: Jack Rosenzwieg

The collections provide a helpful point of entry into the vast database, though the collections themselves are many in number. The collections are drawn from a variety of sources: administrative departments within the city government (the Board of Education, Department of Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Street Cleaning, etc.), political offices (various NYC mayors and Borough presidents), the District Attorney's office and Police Department. There is a collection for images from maps and atlases of the city. The archive also houses materials from the NYC Unit of the federal WPA Writers' Project.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collection names do give a general idea of their contents, but the collections hold many images that are not immediately connected to the originating office or program. For example, the political office collections unsurprisingly hold thousands of images of mayors speaking to the people of New York, glad-handing constituents and otherwise engaged in the activities of their office. But, they also include images related to larger political, cultural and historical context of the mayors' eras. For example, the LaGuardia collection includes some anti-German WWII propaganda, such as John Hawkins' photo of Dan Daniels sculpture of Hitler crushing screaming victims in his hand.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

Other surprises can be found in the Sanitation and Street cleaning collection, which, as you might expect, includes images related to sewers and garbage collection. However, its holdings include many older images, "contain[ing] ... 30,000 acetate (4x5), & some 8x10 glass & acetate negatives and 280 glass (5x7), and 360 lantern slides from its precursor agency the Department of Street Cleaning." Unfortunately most of these images are not available through the online interface, but those that are give a glimpse into the history of public works in New York City, such as this lantern slide of men working on a garbage barge circa the turn of the twentieth century.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

The collections also include a massive project undertaken in the 1980s by the Department of Finance. As described in the archive, the Department of Finance photographed every building and lot in the five NYC Boroughs for tax assessment purposes, updating photos previously taken in 1939 and 1940. These collections could help those interested in architecture, the development of the city over time, or just feeling nostalgic for 1980s movies filmed in New York.

Image Credit: New York City Department of Records

There are a couple of caveats when it comes to the research utility of the archive. First, the amount of metadata provided varies from image to image. The varying quality and quantity of metadata may be due in part to the diverse sources and range of historical eras from which the images come. It makes sense that records from, say, the New York Police Department in 1913 might be limited compared to those available from more recent sources. However, more recent sources do not always provide copious data with their images. The image of Mayor Giuliani from 13 December 1996 above, for instance, contains no information about the people surrounding the mayor or the subject of the event at which he speaks. Images with limited metadata can impede the usefulness of the search function.

Image Credit: Screenshot of LUNA zoom function

The second caveat is about the limited quality of many of the images. The Department of Records offers users the opportunity to purchase high quality prints or high quality digital images for publication purposes. Depending on the research purposes of a given user, lack of higher quality images may pose more or less of a limitation. The LUNA interface allows the user to zoom in on images, but as seen in the image above, when the image quality is low, the zoom is of limited use. Using the Giuliani example again, it is difficult to make out the faces of those standing behind the mayor.

These limits, however, should be balanced against the convenience of online access and the sheer number of artifacts available to the user.

The Secret History of Lines

Laura Thain — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:53:24 +0000

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

With 24 hours to go, media outlets projecting the outcome of election day are covered in geographical maps of states and counties painted starkly in red and blue. I’ve enjoyed the responses of armchair intellectuals like Randall Munroe, who playfully reinterprets the red/blue divide to create a complex and comprehensive visual history of the Republican and Democratic parties. The proliferation of regional and ideological divides across multiple media this week urged me to explore two important questions in visual rhetoric: What does it mean to visualize a geographical boundary? And what does it mean to visualize an invisible line? (I would be remiss not to mention the enormous amount of border studies that exist in postcolonial and Anglophone literature and criticism—but today on viz I will try to confine myself to a discussion of the visualization of intranational borders.) Here to help me is the photography of Colin Stearns, Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons. Stearns' current project is photographing the Mason-Dixon line in order to capture "this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurence." Each of his photographs contain the invisible interstate line somewhere within their composition. I'll also put Stearns in dialogue with William Byrd II, the 18^th century commissioner of the colonial line between North Carolina and Virginia.

First, a bit about the Mason-Dixon line’s place in the historical record and in our national imagination. In his artist’s statement, Stearns recognizes the Mason-Dixon line as a “cultural barrier,” a particularly apt term considering the large discrepancy between the actual and the imagined political effect of the drawing of the line. Surveyed between 1763 and 1767, the line’s chief purpose was to settle a land dispute between the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Barons Baltimore of Maryland. The ensuing line established a firm boundary between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania and Delaware as a satellite colony of Pennsylvania with varying levels of independent government in the colonial period. (Delaware’s history of strong government influence from the dynastic governors of both Maryland and Pennsylvania no doubt contributed to the eagerness of its home-grown politicians to be the first to join, as an independent state, the newly formed United States in the 1780s).

Image Source: Wikipedia

But at no point during the colonial period did the Mason-Dixon serve as an actual dividing line between slave and non-slave colonies because there simply did not exist such a delineation. Laws explicitly prohibiting slavery, with the noted exception of Vermont, did not exist in the colonial period. (Vermont’s Constitutional Charter, which declared Vermont separate from New Hampshire early in the Revolutionary War, is one of, if not the first, abolishments of slavery among the British colonies of North America.) It was not until a full two decades after the Mason-Dixon was drawn that Pennsylvania outlawed slavery (1780); Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire did the same shortly after the recognition of the new Republic in 1783-1784. New York and New Jersey took decades to follow suit (1799 and 1804, respectively), and the line cannot be argued to have the smallest significance in slave/free state designations west of the Appalachians. Delaware, firmly north of the dividing line, did not abolish slavery until the 13^th amendment was passed in 1865. Clearly, the Mason-Dixon line had no correlation to the practice of slavery in the colonial period. It was not until the 19^th century—during Congressional debates culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820—that the Mason-Dixon line began to symbolize a politicized North/South divide that claimed slavery as its principle cultural difference.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

So how can we read the Mason-Dixon Line’s historical significance with more care? How can this reading help inform Stearns’ project and in general expand our conception of the visual representations of political boundaries? I answer this question by going even further back into the colonial 18^th century of America and examining the first significant commissioned survey of a colonial boundary—that of North Carolina and Virginia, led by failed governor hopeful and plantation aristocrat William Byrd II of Virginia.

Image Credit: UNC

Byrd published two histories of his 1728 excursion, both of which have become indispensible primary sources of both public and private life in the 18^th century colonial South. (Byrd’s secret diary, which was decoded only in the 20^th century, gives a particularly detailed glimpse into the private thoughts and cultural attitudes of a colonial husband, land owner, and slave holder.) The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina contains an official account of the survey, but the more interesting text is the semi-parodic and much more candid Secret History of the Dividing Line, which Byrd drafted for a small circle of political elite in England. It is of no small significance that it is in the Secret History, not the official account, that Byrd spends considerable time describing difference between the Virginians, who he saw as the gentile elite of the English colonies in North America, and the North Carolinians, who he describes as disorganized, uneducated, and culturally inferior. In addition, the Secret History also emphasizes that the initiative to survey the line originated within the councils of the colonies themselves, not from a royal entity. The importance of colonial sovereignty in the exercise of drawing the dividing line receives great rhetorical attention, and so the end result of these two conflicting impulses in the text is that while the North Carolinians are culturally discredited, their presence in the process of boundary-making is essential to the legality of the line formed. Byrd is thus able to legitimize the survey expedition both culturally and politically, strengthening his claim to the validity of its existence and the importance of the endeavor.

That Byrd considered these elements to belong to a “secret” history—that is, a suppressed or forgotten one—is in no small way related to the immense amount of cultural labor that surrounds the border-making project, and this is the same type of cultural labor that political factions exert and popular imagination perpetuates in the case of the Mason-Dixon line. The line became a crucial piece of evidence for both secessionist and unionist rhetoric during the various secession crises of 1820-1840, and of course, played a role in the ultimate dissolution of the Union in 1861. Beginning in the 1820’s, the survey stood no longer as a triumph of scientific instrumentation (Mason and Dixon’s survey techniques later led to the first accurate calculations of the earth’s density) in drawing an arbitrary geographical border or a legal precedent for settling land disputes between colonies and therefore states. Instead, the line was used to argue that political borders reflected an innate or organic cultural difference between each side’s respective constituents, and thus, strengthened the legitimacy of the artificial divide. And of course, unlike the lines drawn by the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Mason-Dixon line exists in physical representation, with a stone marker bearing the arms of both Pennsylvania and Maryland placed every 5 miles along the surveyed line.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

And it is artist like Stearns who reveal and interrogate the labor of creating these boundaries. Stearns’ photography does so by several means. First, he utterly avoids the iconic line-markers, choosing instead to allow a mixture of organic and architectural details to connect the physical composition of the photographs to the theoretical subject matter. In highlighting these two types of “line-drawing,” Stearns seems to emphasize both the political border’s reliance on a rhetoric of organic divide (that is, that the cultural distinctions between populations predate the proverbial drawing of a line in the sand) but its essentially constructed nature. Take, for example, this photo:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

Sometimes his photos make a primarily architectural argument:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

And sometimes they seem to make an organic one:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

But almost always, they combine elements of both.

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

If I can get away with making overarching aesthetic claims here, I would like to posit this: the audience, in the very act of viewing these pictures with the knowledge that they are visualizations of a geographical border, searches for delineation within them, even as they know those delineations are artificial. The audience thus becomes both aware of political boundaries as a cultural construction and aware of their own complicitness in creating them; the pieces no longer become a mere accusation of the stark black-and-white artificiality of manmade divides but an interrogation into the process by which we as members of society participate in the creation and perpetuation of those boundaries, even when they become oppressive.

Munroe's Complex Visual History of the US Congress. Image Credit: XKCD

The lines I’ve examined today helped to create and sustain a cultural and geographical border between the North and the South and designate them as opposing ideological spaces, creating a (bi)polarized and (bi)polarizing political rhetoric that has dominated American politics since the splintering of the Democratic Republican party and Jackson’s presidency during the aforementioned 18^th Congress of the 1820’s (but that’s another long story). Where might we go further with this investigation? Can we use extend these arguments to describe how political boundaries function in 21^st century America? Does, for instance, our current connection between political boundary and ideological identity depend less upon regional dichotomies (North/South, East Coast/West Coast) and more upon population density (urban/rural)? How does this change how we might read these invisible lines?

Children, Monsters and the Anticipation of Mayhem: Analyzing the Horror Photography of Joshua Hoffine (NSFW)

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:09:58 +0000

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

With Halloween on the horizon, I thought I'd take a break from the horror show of the campaign to consider some more visceral scares, and photographer Joshua Hoffine provides viscera aplenty in his works. The image above is one of Hoffine's tamer outings, though it is still disturbing. A small child stands outside before a clothes line hung with drying laundry. The sun shines behind a large white sheet, casting the shadow of a clown holding a bunch of balloons in one hand and displaying a set of menacing claws on the other. Hoffine uses children in many of his photos, contrasting the innocence and helplessness of childhood with the savage agency of monsters human and supernatural. Before we look at other photos, I suggest readers consider the images below the fold not safe for work or for those who prefer to avoid depictions of bodily violence and mutilation, death and decomposition, children in life threatening scenes, or children posed near their dead, violently murdered, parent's corpses.

Unlike many horror books and films where tension is built over time by hinting at or showing fleeting glimpses of the monster, the still photograph lacks a diachronic dimension. The image must choose one of three options: it can hint at some undepicted horror, depict some partial glimpse, or show it straight on. Hoffine's latest work, a dyptych of Jack The Ripper just before and after he kills and disembowels a woman, gestures toward a sense of elapsed time, but I don't find this work as affective as some of his other images. Readers can click through the links to see the pair, but I'm not including them here because I see such Ripper imagery as more exploitative than imaginative. I find the violence of the real world tragic and depressing and prefer the thrills and chills of zombies and ghouls. There is something about the bluntness of the evisceration that makes me read the image differently than other Hoffine works, akin to my distaste for the torture horror films of recent years contrasted with the still-horrific yet more pscyhologically-engaging-if-disturbing body horror in the style of Cronenberg, though this line of argument goes beyond the still images I want to consider in this post.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The first time you see Hoffine's more explicit images, the shock may be greater than his non-explicit works, but I find that they are not the works that stay most prominently in my memory. Sure, seeing a humanoid murderer wearing the stretched out skinned face of a mother, while her corpse lays on a table with her daughter coming around a corner in the background is shocking, but it lacks the anticipation offered in other works. And that anticipation, the waiting for the monster to act, helps embed the image in my mind, as if I'm continually expecting the action to complete itself, such as with the clown monster or the basement monster photo below.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The monster itself is quite explicit, lurking under the basement stairs, but it awaits the unsuspecting, pig-tailed little girl making her way toward its grasp, not yet confronting the terror that awaits her.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Hoffine also builds tension in some images of killers, though again, for me, with less effect. Above, we stand beyond a doorway looking into a kitchen. A young babysitter carries an infant, investigating a strange noise she heard just beyond the corner where we can see a maniacal killer waits with knife poised to strike. Below, we look through the keyhole of a door to discover the beheaded corpse of an ax murder victim, as the killer turns, ax in hand, to look back at us. For all three photos, the viewer's mind fills in what events next occur (or resists doing so), supplying a sense of impending doom that an explicit depiction of the moment of physical trauma alone (monster attack, knife attack, ax attack) would lack.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

Un-imaged (and perhaps unimaginable) horror plays a central role in Hoffine's Pickman's Masterpice sequence. Hoffine explains the sequence in his behind-the-scenes blog (where he details the considerable work he, his crew and models go through). The sequence depicts a story by H.P. Lovecraft about an artist that paints realistic horrific images. In the sequence, we see the protagonist react to Pickman's masterpiece, but we do not see the painting itself, and again the viewer is left to fill in the blank.

Image Credit: Joshua Hoffine

The Visual Rhetoric of Space: Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism in Astronomical Imagery

Todd Battistelli — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: NASA

With the recent passing of Neil Armstrong, the decommissioning of the space shuttles, and the release of the latest "deep field" image from the Hubble Space Telescope, the rhetoric of space imagery has been on my mind. Except for the occasional "why waste money on this?" argument, astronomical images find wide appreciation, appreciation which I certainly share. However, I also see a certain risk in the arguments made using space imagery that can be lost amidst the optimism and wonder.

The truism of an image speaking a thousand words falters before a photo like the one above where the immensity of space threatens to swallow all words. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field is a compilation of observations of a small section of sky. As science writer Phil Plait says, even in such a small section, the telescope captures over 5000 galaxies, each with billions of stars.

The human mind cannot begin to understand such size and scope. Plait admits, "We humans, our planet, our Sun, our galaxy, are so small as to be impossible to describe on this sort of scale," yet he insists, "that's a good perspective to have." He goes on:

...we figured this out. Our curiosity led us to build bigger and better telescopes, to design computers and mathematics to analyze the images from those devices, and to better understand the Universe we live in.
And it all started with simply looking up. Always look up, every chance you get. There’s a whole Universe out there waiting to be explored.

Images somewhat closer to home more easily inspire human-scale arguments. Some see in the view of Earth from space an argument for human unity and concern for our environment, and these are common views from those who have made the trip into orbit. Such images first came to prominence during the Apollo missions, especially with "Earthrise" taken by William Anders during Apollo 8's mission to orbit the Moon.

Image Credit: NASA, William Anders

The image shows a small but vibrantly blue and white Earth set against the blackness of space and rising above the gray, rocky surface of the Moon's horizon in the foreground. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, remarked:

When you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people. (quoted in Denis Cosgrove's Geographical Imagination and the Authority of Images p. 22)

Image Credit: NASA

The "Blue Marble" and "Blue Marble 2012" offer closer perspectives of Earth's land, sea, and air unmarked by the political divisions of national borders.

Image Credit: NASA

Seeing these images, I find the unifying argument of an astronomical perspective enticing but also risky. If humans ever move out into space in any number, I think it likely that we'll take the full range of our social baggage with us, the values and ideas that inspire both justice and injustice. The risk lies in the tendency for factional interests to disguise themselves as universals. "The people of Earth" as a concept works well in the abstract, but it can obscure the contradictions that abound within that identification. Take, for example, the plaque left on the base of Apollo 11's lander.

Image Credit: NASA

The plaque bears the signatures of the three mission astronauts: Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. It also bears the signature of then-president Richard Nixon. (Sometimes I wonder if, in our distant future, some civilization, which has the ability to translate written English but lacks historical knowledge, might, in its exploration of the Moon, conclude that Nixon was among the first people to make the quarter million mile journey.)

The plaque speaks to American audiences and audiences the American government wished to address, though it gestures toward a global ethos by including images of the eastern and western hemispheres. The text reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." That stated intention of peace contrasts with the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War that drove the space program. During this peaceful mission, when Nixon spoke to astronauts on the moon from the Oval Office, he was also ordering the bombing of Cambodia and oversaw other campaigns in the Vietnam War – itself another event tied to the Cold War. I don't mean to suggest that the Apollo program was not peaceful in itself, but it existed within a complex set of relationships between war and peace and between the peoples of the Earth that an overly optimistic perspective can obscure.

Perhaps unity, then, may not be the best argument to construct from the visual products of our space explorations. Or, at least, not unqualified and decontextualized arguments for unity. A contextualized argument can be found somewhere between the unthinkably vast scope of the deep field image and the almost familiar views of Earth from orbit.

Image Credit: NASA

The Voyager 1 probe took this "Pale Blue Dot" image of our homeworld when it was some 3.5+ billion miles from Earth in 1990. Earth appears as a barely noticeable point (0.12 pixels according to Wikipedia) in the right-most bar of sunlight set against the void. Carl Sagan had asked NASA to take the photo. In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Sagan offered an argument that speaks to a hopeful future while it also acknowledges tragedies past and present and the considerable challenges we face even with the suasive potential of astronomical images:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

“Colorizing” the Black-and-White Past

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:06:41 +0000

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

Abraham Lincoln has been colored in by means of computer software. There are more color photographs of the past today than there have ever been before: and that is because people, like artist Sanna Dullaway, are using Photoshop to colorize black and white ones. In this post, I wonder why.

To approach an understanding, it will be helpful to consider a few examples of real color photographs taken in the later Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century. Color photography got its start with famed Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’swork on the perception of color in the 1850s, although it wasn't until 1907 that the Lumière brothers introduced the first commercially viable technology for color photography. In 1909, French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (not to be confused with the architect by that name) hired professional photographers to go out and capture the world in true color. Here's a French scene from that groundbreaking series:

Image Credit: Musée Albert Kahn

With Lumière brothers' “Autochrome” technology, photographs from the early Twentieth Century started to flow. In the one below, a French soldier looks out from his post in Eglingen, Haut-Rhin: 1917.

Image Credit: Paul Castelnau

And below is a photograph of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who travelled the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915, capturing its peoples and places in color.

Image Credit: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress)

These photographs shock me into a realization so basic it is hard to put into words. History is really real. The old cities were really there, in full color. Men and women looked then like they do today; streams were blue then, hair was red, clouds were white, clothes were blue. The world was just as bright in the past as it is today. Hundreds, thousands, of years ago was fully as present to those living then as today is present to us. All the black and white photos and books through which I have learned about history had allowed a creeping sort of disbelief into my attitude towards the past. I realize I have sometimes equated the past with the media through which it has been made present to me. These color photographs inspire me to imagine the past anew as pulsing, felt, immediate.

Of course, color photography is a medium; it is still a technology for capturing a visual effect and reproducing it to a now distant viewer. The immediacy I am feeling is in my imagination. I think it is this feeling of immediacy which people who are colorizing black and white photos are trying to produce.

Image Credit: Sanna Dullaway

In this image, artist Sanna Dullaway has colorized Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic “V-J Day in Times Square,” originally published with the caption: In New York's Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.

It's like it happened yesterday.

Press(ing) Matter

Sarah Orem — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: BBC News

Only a scant 23 days elapsed after TMZ leaked nude photos of Prince Harry that French tabloid Closer printed images of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on the balcony of a Provence guesthouse. In addition to the frenzied speculation about the photos themselves (Is the queen upset with her grandson? Was Middleton truly in private, since she was photographed on a terrace? Are there more images that will emerge?) it’s interesting to note that the press itself has been the subject of equal amounts of scrutiny.

The issue of where these revealing pictures would be published quickly became one of the most discussed aspects of this story. While UK’s The Sun printed Prince Harry’s photos on its front page, the same tabloid refused to publish indiscreet images of Kate. The royal family has brought a lawsuit against Closer for a breach of privacy. And, CNN speculates that since TMZ ran Prince Harry’s images before any British newspaper, it might mean that 1) the American press effectively “scooped” their English counterparts and, 2) that digital media is outpacing print journalism. Though Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge are – literally – on display in this controversy, the press has become just as visible as the royal family.

Image Credit: Reuters

Visual texts, such as paparazzi photos and newsstand images, have become the site for a global conversation about the our right to privacy (or publicity). Many journalists claim that Kate’s photos represent “an invasion of privacy,” since she and her husband were on a “remote property” when captured on film. Conversely, columnists have seized Prince Harry’s photos as evidence of his “wild ways,” deeming the young man irresponsible for allowing the images to surface publicly. Here, visual objects allow journalists to rhetorically construct the ethos of those represented in the images.

By employing the language of the public/private split, news writers unwittingly wade into a long-standing scholarly debate on the same subject. It’s curious (or very, very appropriate) to see Kate Middleton’s images associated with privacy (which was “brutal[ly]” invaded), while the visual documentation of Prince Harry’s partying has been labeled “indisputably in the public domain.” Public sphere theorist Michael Warner points out in Publics and Counterpublics (2005) that women have long been associated with the private sphere (the home, the family) while “masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space” (24). Though both members of the royal family could have reasonably expected privacy while undressing – Kate at a friend’s home, Harry in a hotel suite – journalists locate the Duchess’s nudity in the private sphere, and the Prince’s in public.

Not only are the distinctions between public and private increasingly articulated in visual terminology, as I argue above, but they are also defined on and through the medium of the body. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz unpacks the many significations we commonly heap onto the body in Volatile Bodies (1994): embodiment often becomes the physical locus for distinctions between

reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on. (3)

It seems that royal bodies bear an especially hefty portion of the conceptual weight we assign to the flesh as matter. Both the Duchess Catherine and Prince Harry’s bodies have become the site for a global discussion about the public vs. the private.

These sovereign bodies have also been used to flesh out (pun intended) our contemporary attitudes towards sex. The press has criticized Prince Harry’s licentiousness and lauded Her Highness’ sense of family duty, and I speculate that the disparity between these two reactions has something to do with the context in which their bodies appear. Middleton’s photos locate her in the frame of a heterosexual, monogamous, married, relationship. Swirling pregnancy rumors also link her sexuality with procreation. Reporters implicitly assign her to what Gayle Rubin calls the “Charmed Circle” of “good, normal, natural” sex. Rubin outlines the differences between taboo and accepted sexual practices in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” even providing a succinct chart to illustrate her argument.

Image Credit: University of Victoria

The press positions Prince Harry’s sexuality in Rubin’s “Outer Limits,” or, what dominant culture often deems “bad, abnormal, unnatural” sex. Since the images depict the young prince alongside several similarly unclothed women, media sources accuse him of participating in casual, promiscuous, and unmarried sex. His activities are seen as non-procreative and in a group, as opposed to within a relationship. Rubin’s writing might explain why journalistic rhetoric holds Prince Harry culpable for his own photos while exonerating the Duchess of Cambridge: his body is linked to non-normative sex, and hers isn’t.

Some tabloid websites, including The Hollywood Gossip, suggest that the leak of Harry’s photos “constitutes an epic failure on his handlers’ part.” The website argues that both Prince Harry and his “people” were “either clueless or careless” by not forcing the women with whom Harry was pictured to hand over their phones before the party began. This article implicitly raises the issue of control, blaming Harry for failing to reign in not only his own behavior, but the actions of those around him as well. This terminology of bodily control evokes the logic of Cartesian dualism, in which the activity of the mind gets contrasted with the inert body. The Cartesian theorization of the body typically reads corporeality in “naturalistic, organic, passive, inert terms, seeing it as an intrusion on or interference with the operation of the mind, a brute givenness which requires overcoming” (Grosz 3-4). Western philosophy typically construes the body as a blank slate onto which cultural norms get projected, or, as formless matter awaiting shape from the thinking mind.

Image Credit: PerezHilton.com

In being shocked by the prince’s lack of control, casting him as “careless,” the rhetoric of many journalists links up with the long-standing tradition of viewing the body as brute matter in need of discipline. Relying on and perpetuating the logics of Cartesian binarism, websites like The Hollywood Gossip condemn the prince because he refuses to “overcome” bodily excess. Because this rhetoric suggests the prince possesses an out-of-control corporeality, he is feminized. To return again to Grosz’s explication of Cartesianism, she points out that within the mind/body distinction, the “coupling of mind with maleness” leads to the association of “the body with femaleness” (4). Masculinity is graced with knowledge, thought, and enlightened rationalism, and femininity is bound to bodily excess. Unlike his sister-in-law, whose marital status the press seizes as an example of control and discipline (affording to her the privilege of masculinity’s “disavowal of the body”?), Prince Harry is constructed in feminine terminology by popular rhetoric (Grosz 4).

My final thoughts on this matter concern how the actions of the popular press affect even the most pedestrian, un-famous individuals (like you or me). The now ubiquitous claim that the press wronged Kate Middleton by invading her privacy has suggestive ramifications. By saying that photographers breached her privacy we imply that privacy is somehow sacred, or a space where an individual can exert control over their body. Does this association between privacy and autonomy correlate to the idea that publicity is not sacred? Put another way: if Middleton should have been protected under the guise of her privacy, would she not be protected in a public setting? I’ll admit, the question sounds a bit silly. But, I’d like to believe that even in public spaces we have the right to control our bodies, how they are represented, and what’s done to them. Personally, I would rather frame the issue in terms of consent: the widespread publication of these photos troubles me because neither Prince Harry nor the Duchess of Cambridge were given the opportunity to consent to the literally global display of their bodies.

The Funny Faces of Politics: No Photoshop Required

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Reuters

As we’re in the middle of another presidential campaign, I thought I’d devote my inaugural viz. post to an aspect of visual political rhetoric: photos capturing politicians with odd facial expression or in odd poses. One of the better known examples of this phenomenon is the above photo of John McCain from the last debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the still image, McCain stands behind Barack Obama, seeming to lurch after him while disrespectfully sticking out his tongue and reaching out with his hands. I want to stress “seeming,” though, because viewing McCain’s movement in context offers an alternative explanation.

Video Credit: C-SPAN

McCain’s seemingly undignified lurch occurred at the end of the debate, as he, Obama and moderator Bob Schieffer stood up from the table to shake hands. As seen in C-SPAN’s video (starting at 1:29:42), McCain is uncertain of which direction to round the table. In his hesitation, he makes a funny, self-deprecating gesture to make light of his momentary confusion. Not being the most graceful person myself, I can imagine doing something similar were I in McCain’s position. Yet the lurching image soon proliferated on the web, casting McCain as a creepy, out-of-touch old man.

Photojournalists do take a great number of pictures, so their capturing the occasional odd look isn’t unexpected. What I find curious, however, is the editorial decision that goes into releasing still photos of odd expressions when other, more decorous photos are available. As with many aspects of visual culture, there’s a tumblr that collects these funny faces titled Stupid Faces of Politics, which bills itself as “a non-partisan collection of amusing faces made by politicians, both past and present.”

Image Credit: Stupid Faces of Politics

Looking through the images, you could make the argument that photojournalists capture politicians as human beings, including all their foibles, though a still photo out of context can be used to vilify as much as humanize, as the McCain example suggests. The images could also serve the function of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. The viewing public can enjoy a good chuckle at people in positions of power. Editorial policy, however, is tangential to my interests here.

More relevant to visual rhetorical analysis are questions about the use of these images and what those uses say about the production and reading of persuasive texts. My students sometimes run into trouble when they cite a source without understanding its context, but ignorance doesn’t seem to play a role in the operation (or manipulation) of context when it comes to these photos. The context of these photos is widely understood: weird expressions cross everyone’s face for fractions of a second, and sometimes they get recorded for posterity. Yet, they are not dismissed as “bad” photos. On the contrary, they serve as a important resource for rhetorical invention.

Image credit: Laura Clawson

When they appear on partisan blogs, these images are used not only for humor but also to support larger narratives about politicians and their parties. The above photo can be read as Mitt Romney desperately attempting to engage his empathy circuits, as blogger Laura Clawson suggests. Or below, President Obama seems to sport a patrician and elitist mug that looks down on common people, which is the narrative blogger Nice Deb invokes.

Image Credit: Nice Deb

In an age of photoshopping, what are the different suasive functions that these “authentic” images perform in contrast with, say, an image of Joe Biden manipulated to put a colorful lollipop in his hand and an exaggerated tongue extruding from his mouth? Do the ostensibly documentary origins of non-manipulated photos enhance their appeal?

Image Credit: Stogie

At a step removed from the bloggers who use these photos to construct arguments, I also wonder about which photos get released by which sources. Might they reveal some subtle argumentative strategy? Does the White House under Obama, for instance, release more odd photos of John Boehner than the Bush White House did of Harry Reid? This might not be the best example, though, as Boehner seems to be rather more susceptible to awkward photos than other politicians (saving perhaps Joe Biden, as photos like the one below attest).

Image credit: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich

Unmarking Death

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:47:35 +0000

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

H/T: Lauren Gantz

Death is often in the news, whether it involves major singers, local Austin celebrities, or Twitter death hoaxes. Yet when we visualize death, it’s typically in memorials, not actual pictures of dead bodies. We’ve come some ways from the Victorian memento mori photographs which attempted to render the corpse vital and to serve, as Jamie Fraser notes, “as a keepsake to remember the deceased.” While traditional burial practices, which use embalming fluids to delay putrefaction and decomposition, likewise make the corpse appear as lifelike as possible, most people don’t make hair rings or take pictures of the dead to remember them. In this way, we remember the dead as not dead—as lively. In his photography series Unmarked, Stephen Chalmers presents an alternative way to represent death.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In a recent NPR article, Chalmers discusses Unmarked’s origins in a hiking trip that went past one of Ted Bundy’s dumpsites. As he says, “[J]ust that little kernel of information really changed how I felt about what was otherwise a really fantastic early date. I was struck by how my experience of this place was so changed by knowing the history of the location.” Thus, the series features the locations in which serial killers disposed of their victims’ bodies. Each photograph is named for the victim left in the place.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

In photographs like the one above, Jennifer Joseph, Chalmers uses focus to direct the viewer’s attention to the specific place where the body once lay. The placid pastoral scene contrasts dramatically with the idea of violence that murder contains, but there is no dramatic visual tension in the photograph. As Chalmers tells NPR, “I kind of like the absence of spectacle. I’m a quiet person. I like for the images I make to be quiet.” The images are quiet in their lack of subjects and their rural backgrounds. The tetherball in Debra Estes hints at a more suburban setting, but the photo’s only dynamism occurs in the contrast of the yellow tetherball set against the browns and greens. However, Chalmers also explicitly states on his website that the images are meant not only to refuse “clichés of prefabricated sentimentality,” but also to “convey the original sense of shock at arriving at these sites of trauma and also that the self-conscious refusal of information and emptiness of the images and conveys our distance from this sense of shock to demonstrate the essential inaccessibility of these traumatic events and degrading deaths.” If the Victorian image is a “prefabricated sentimentality,” Unmarked works differently.

Image Credit: Stephen Chalmers

Unmarked represents death in this “absence of spectacle,” the still scenes set against the media circus surrounding serial killers and their victims. Because we cannot hope to either represent or fully comprehend the victims’ traumatic deaths, the only way to do so is through its visual opposite. However, while such a series seems deeply respectful of the victims, it only displays death in its lack of display. Chalmers’ visual logic suggests that the only true way to represent murder victims is by refusing to represent them—a treatment that is provocative and beautiful, but may only reinforce the victims’ absence. Where is the space in which mourners can represent the dead, between too much and too little presence? Is the only way our culture can show death is by unmarking it?

Sex Sells?: Reading Romance Over the Covers

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:28:28 +0000

Image Credit: Screencap from Vimeo

H/T: Andrew Sullivan

I thought after my last post on Ryan Gosling that I’d be able to move on to more academic subjects, but when I saw Andrew Sullivan’s post on “The Market for Romance” I couldn’t let it pass. In my Women’s Popular Genres literature class last year I taught Fay Weldon’s wickedly funny novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which tells the story of Ruth, a woman who gets revenge on her husband after he leaves her for a romance novelist. I wanted to pair it with an actual romance novel, but wasn’t sure I could find something that would sustain close reading. However, I think a rhetorical approach to the romance novel—especially its cover—reveals some interesting things.

TIME Magazine produced this interesting video that takes viewers to a romance cover photoshoot. I enjoyed not only inspecting the goods on display, but also hearing from Kensington Publishing Corporation’s Creative Director Kristine Mills-Noble on what she looks for in these poses:

Mills-Noble, after giving some directions to the model, explains the goal of these covers thus:

The fantasy is that this is the man who’s going to jump out of planes to rescue me in any situation. You know, we want to be seduced; we don’t want to be overcome. We don’t want to be abused. We don’t want to be taken advantage of.

Image Credit: Anne Marsh

She further notes that, to create this fantasy, the model must carefully manage the placement of his hands, the look in his eyes, and the amount of muscle he shows. Too much muscle makes him look more Hulkish than heroic; a hand wrong might come across as threatening rather than protective. The picture above shows the shoot’s final product—and Marcus appears strong and confident as he meets the viewer’s eye. The expression just misses stern; the hands almost suggest that he’s about to remove the jumpsuit, but the full exposure he might offer is rather physical than emotional. Yet it isn’t extremely lurid—his chest is mostly covered, only hinting at the body beneath.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

Despite the popular image of the bare-chested Fabio covers, this is actually consistent with what many romance readers say they want. When the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books critiqued an article that attempts to perpetuate reader shame for consuming romances, commenter Hannah E. notes that “While I can agree that I wish the covers of my favorite books didn’t sport naked male torsos (these aids to my imagination simply aren’t necessary), I’m never afraid to admit that I love romance novels.” Hannah’s contrast here juxtaposes a pride in reading romance with a dislike of traditional cover art. If there’s shame, it’s in the ways the cover art represents her romance. While contemporary romance novels contain even more erotic content than you’d find in a Georgette Heyer romance, displaying that content seems to create a dissonance for readers. The naked male chest seems to reduce these works to mere porn, whereas readers like Maria Bustillos see this as an imaginative space for women to discuss real-life problems and work out what they want in men:

The second purpose of romance novels is the exercise of imagination. This may sound paradoxical, given that there is a definite formula to these stories. But they are indeed vehicles for the imagination; each one a love rollercoaster, if you like, to tempt our fantasies. To idealize. What would a really wonderful man be like? What are the very best characteristics that men and women can have? What would the most exciting possible moment in a love affair be like; how would the tenderest lover behave?

Thus, while the title’s pun suggests Anne Marsh wants her readers to be Burning Up, the cover art offers readers one way to imagine what a sensitive smoke jumper might look like. Looking through other titles published by Kensington Publishing Corporation, I was struck that for every Hot Rain or Smooth Play that focuses on the naked muscled chest, there are works like Lutisha Lovely’s Taking Care of Business which suggests other fantasies.

Image Credit: Kensington Publishing Corporation

The two men on this cover are well-dressed and broad-shouldered. Their hands in their pockets suggest confidence as much as their eye contact. The slight smile worn by the gentleman on the right hints that he can “take care of business” as the reader requires and makes the reader complicit in the insinuation. The punning nature of the titles and taglines, I’d suggest, directs these images to an aware audience who imagine themselves as active readers and sexual agents. Instead of celebrating rape, the contemporary romance today markets itself to a readership that can appreciate Fay Weldon alongside Anne Marsh.

Horsing Around: Inside and Out

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:49:48 +0000

Image credit Unknown via f*** yeah, wild horses

Last week I wrote about the curious dual-natured relationship we seem to have with horses. In books and film and popular media horses are situated as both friend, companion, partner and as disposable beast, object, mere chattel. Last week, too, I teased the case of Jasha Lottin and the relationship she had with a horse. Her story is surprisingly simple at first blush. Lottin and her friend bought a 32-year-old, near-dead horse already scheduled to be euthanized. They shot it in the head with a high powered rifle—apparently killing it instantly and painlessly. Then Lottin, a nudist and Star Wars fan, staged a photo shoot featuring her and the now-dead horse. Throughout the following post I’ll be discussing her pictures with the horse. They are excessively gory; there is some nudity. Discretion advised. Not safe for work content after the break.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin is tucked into the now emptied out horse—Skywalker style. Its organs and blood are splayed out on the ground; she has replaced them. Her smiling face pokes out near its back legs. There’s no certainty of the horse’s sex, but in either case she takes the place of its genitals. These photos, especially those with Lottin tucked inside, trend towards neither horse nor human but instead a combination of the two. They’re, together, an inverted centaur composed upon and within the body of a horse. The combination is, as we must be sure to remember, not equal. Even though she has positioned herself within the horse, in its belly, its Lottin that consumed the horse both figuratively and literally.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

There is something strange about these images of her eating some bit of the horse. Last week I wrote about Daenerys’ ritualistic consumption of the horse heart. She was glistening and bloody, and while she and the heart were prominent there was no horse to be seen. Lottin’s consumption, though, doesn’t have nearly the same pop, the same flare. Her bloody hands look like they were dipped in red corn syrup; the piece of horse she tugs on seems small and insignificant. The banality of her representation forces the viewer to actively recall the embodied reality of her act. These photos point toward an actual woman and an actual horse and actual death.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Throughout almost all of the photos Lottin wears a broad grin. Here Lottin and her unnamed friend are posing with the horse’s heart. Both grinning, they hold the heart up in what must be a pretty common hunter’s-fresh-kill-trophy pose (I’ve taken any number of such pictures while fishing). Her constant grin is one of the most intriguing aspects of these pictures. There’s no sense of gravity, no notion of sadness or remorse or really any hint that this entire event is anything but lark. It should be noted that after posting these photos Lottin was reported to the authorities; after investigating they found that she broke no laws. What I think people found so shocking, though, was her smile. Because of that smile—a fixed photo smile, unconscious, reflexive, ubiquitous—there isn’t any real room for anything but the snap acknowledgement of these photos as simple snap shots of (what many saw to be) grotesque activity.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin stands naked and covered in blood, perhaps having just emerged from inside the dead horse. This photo, though, subverts any sense of hybridization or actual relationship between Lottin and the horse. She has killed the animal and eaten it and played within it, but still there’s nothing but a facile connection. The blood remains on the surface as she looks down at the dead horse as nothing more than a hollowed out prop. What is there here to separate her from the spectacle of the films written about last week? Her horse, though specifically killed in order to make the photos, is little more than a prop.

Image credit Ars Electronica 2011 via New Scientist

Next week I’ll be looking at a different kind of horsey performance. In 2011 Marion Laval-Jeantet undertook a piece of performance art that explored the possibilities of a more substantial, embodied, relationship with a horse.

Horsey Beginnings: Setting the Stage

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:34:28 +0000

Image Credit the Bureau of Land Management

In George Lucas's Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo rides a tauntaun out into the frozen wastes of Hoth; he needs to find his friend, Luke Skywalker. In George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Deanerys Targaryen, a princess in exile, takes center stage in a ceremony for the sake of her child-to-be. She has to eat a raw, fresh horse heart. In Washington County, a Portland woman and her friend buy a near dead horse, shoot it in the head, cut it open, and take pictures, lots of bloody pictures. The following post does not contain these images (a future post will, though).

Image Credit Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Han Solo has to find his friend. He saddles his tauntaun and rides out into the rapidly freezing night. He's told that he won't get far. His tauntaun will freeze before he reaches the first marker. Han doesn't care. Han doesn't care about his tauntaun, and there's no real distinction made, on his part, between this living transportation and his normal mechanical means of getting around. The tauntuans are pretty strange; they look like a kangaroo-dinosaur blend. What almost instantly endears them to the audience, though, is that he saddles the animal; it has reins. Han's a real space cowboy now. He, for a moment, has a real live horse. These tauntauns, too, have perhaps the most pathos filled utterance of any creature in Star Wars. They are filled with emotion. Well, that's the case until Han cuts his now dead tauntaun open and we see that it's filled with guts. Han, as he stuffs Luke into the tauntaun, notes its stink. The tauntuan--dead, sliced open, and stuffed with Luke, is left without a shred of dignity.

Image Credit Game of Thrones via Nerdy Gamer Girl

[A slight note to the reader. While I didn't feel terrible about spoiling a thirty year old movie Game of Thrones (show and book both) are slightly more recent. So, (slight) spoiler warning.]

Deanerys, still pretty much a child, is married off to an older man, the leader of a people dependent on horses. He frightens her, but she learns to love him, and she learns to love the horses. When she discovers that she is pregnant she is taken to some elders and told to eat a horse heart to prove that she's woman enough bear her husband's child. In the book, Martin doesn't spend terribly much time describing the horse eating, but in the show they give us a lavish scene. We don't see the heart cut from any horse, and in some ways it's presented as its own object, free of any horsey connections, much as you might buy from a store. Well, not quite store like. The heart is still, seemingly, full of blood, and as Deanerys works her way through the several pounds of flesh she gets covered. The scene is hard to watch; she, covered in blood, shiny and slimy, nauseous. She chokes down every bite.

Image Credit The Searchers via Gone Movie

We don't, as a general rule, eat horses in the United States. Wikipedia has a nice run down of various historical reasons horsemeat is taboo in different cultures, but one of the most convincing reasons that I have heard for the American distaste of horse meat is that horses are looked at less as beasts and more as companion animals. People talk about cowboys and their relationship with horses as fundamentally ingrained in an American imaginary. And while I don't know if there is any particular research to back up these claims, having grown up watching westerns as a little boy they strike a chord with me. But the horse, the cowboy's companion, is always still an animal. It can be killed, but its killing, while not a damning act is at least worrisome. Horses occupy the curious double space of both means of transportation and friend.

Image Credit Lonesome Dove via American Bedu

[My post is full of spoilers today. Both Lonesome Dove and True Grit are pretty old, but with the new True Grit getting released recently I thought that I'd give a heads up for anyone that is about to watch it.]

They have personality when the story demands and none when it doesn't, and these switches seldom need justification. In Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove there are named horses and unnamed Gus cuts his unnamed horse down and uses it to hide from gunshot--neither McMurtry nor the reader skip a beat in killing the animal. A good portion of the first chapter, and throughout the rest of the long novel, Captain Call interacts with a horse; he has a relationship with the Hell Bitch. She's as tough, tougher maybe than he is.

Image Credit True Grit via The Diplomacy of Kasey Driscoll

Han's search for Luke and tauntaun sacrifice mirrors Rooster's race to save Mattie's life in True Grit. Throughout the story (equally held up in both films, and I assume the novel) horses are front and center. They're haggled over, argued about, praised. And though different characters approach them with different intensities, Mattie’s care and affection for the horses isn't played off as a little girl's whims. Her strength, throughout the story is apparent, and her relationship with her horse Little Blackie is presented as genuine and admirable. But Rooster sacrifices Little Blackie--sacrifice cleans things up too much. He brutally rides him to death. In the more recent film this point is amplified. Rooster rides Little Blackie as far and fast as he'll go, then stabs him to push him further. Once Little Blackie falls Rooster shoots him. But Mattie is saved. The climax of the film revolves around this horse. The characters are forgotten and we feel for the horse; Rooster disgusts us. Minutes after the horse is dead he is forgotten, though. The film ends firmly focused on Mattie and Rooster, neither are disgusting.

That horses are disposable and relatable for many people raised on westerns and American horse culture is why the story of Jasha Lottin is so strange. In next week's post I'll be focused on her actions and pictures.

Staring at Shoppers Staring

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:10:09 +0000

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Elkhart, IL 2003

Over the holidays I stumbled across Copia, a series of photos by Brian Ulrich. Throughout them he resists the packaged narratives we have for our consumerism. In both critique and support it seems that the act of shopping is pushed toward two extremes. There’s shopping as glitzy exuberance and shopping as a soul crushing slog. In Copia we can see a different perspective. He writes that the project “began as a response to the heated environment of 2001.” In the aftershock of September 11th any possible community driven healing process “was quickly outpaced as the government encouraged citizens to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy thereby equating consumerism with patriotism.” His photographs show, more than anything else, a deadening sense of resignation. The people in his photos are grimfaced; they are doing their duty as they move through the various middleclass shopscapes. In these photographs we see shoppers as the products experience them.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Chicago, IL 2003

For all the grief poured upon malls and big-box stores they are often still held up as great places to people watch. Go to the mall and see the suburban dad in his natural habitat. These photos, though, don’t imagine people seeing people; the lens is not a stand in for our eyes. And one of the most intruiging aspects of Ulrich’s work is that more these photos actively work against a human gaze—they’re an environment’s gaze, a pillar’s gaze, a toy’s gaze. Because there’s no readymade anthropomorphic gaze that a viewer can enter into there’s no real sense of familiarity in these photos. So even though nearly any viewer has been and most probably is the people featured we cannot find a point of recognition.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Gurnee, IL 2005

While it’s easy to read a certain smirk into the photographs, I think that we should resist the impulse. Ulrich, or perhaps more properly, the objects watching us aren’t mean spirited. By finding a spirit in them at all (other than mean it’s exceedingly easy to read pity into them) I think that we miss the mark. So rather than attempting an interpretation of the image we can instead, see it as an active flattening of the objects in play. The boy and the miniatures and the landscapes as objects in relation to one another.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Untitled, 2006 (0621)

Copia has been an active project since 2001, and eventually Ulrich shifted from malls and big-box stores to thrift shops. And while many of these photos capture people in the same way he did before the resignation is compounded. Five years on from the project’s beginning and the heaped objects have taken on the empty burden of the shoppers. They are worn out, used up.

Image Credit: Brian Ulrich, Rose, Northridge Mall, 2010

Ulrich continues to move and nine years into the project his focus has largely shifted to the stores themselves. Amidst the busted out, weary, empty malls and supercenters is the above photograph of an abandoned mall’s parking lot. The parking lot has slowly gone to seed. The once neatly trimmed planters have overgrown, and grass and weeds have begun to poke through the concrete. With this Ulrich, rather than playing on something like a hopeful return-to-nature, instead shows the naturalness of the mall. These environments, supercenters and malls and big-box retail buildings, are inhabited by people and plants and products.

Seeing the First Photograph

Steven J LeMieux — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:20:47 +0000

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center and J. Paul Getty Museum)

The first photograph is hard to see. Though, really, that shouldn't have come as a surprise. The Harry Ransom Center makes it exceedingly clear on their website that not only will the image be difficult to make out, but that each viewer will in some sense be reperforming its discovery. Their instructions for viewing the photo include a short epigraph by Helmut Gernsheim, a photohistorian that rediscovered the piece in 1952. Of his first viewing of the photograph he writes "No image was to be seen. Then I increased the angle—and suddenly the entire courtyard scene unfolded itself in front of my eyes. The ladies were speechless. Was I practicing black magic on them?"

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center)

My encounter was the opposite in some regards. The Ransom Center was hosting a local field trip when I went to take a second look at Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's photograph (my first look at the piece was little more than a quick glance during a hurried round through the collection), and there were two girls sitting in the photo's viewing room diligently working on some field trip assignment that involved drawing multiple versions of the photograph. I stood square in front of the piece, looking down at it through the several plates of glass, tilting my head this way as I attempted to shift the glare somewhere less bothersome. They stood less for my unseeing than I did, and I was quickly instructed by a helpful, if somewhat exasperated, voice behind me to look at it from different angles. I obliged.

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center)

I wasn't, though, magically greeted with something like the reproduction. Instead, as I twisted around the piece as best I could, I was given only the slightest hints of the image that the pewter plate had captured. Having seen the clearly defined reproduction I could, to a degree, reinscribe it upon the object that I was viewing, but the more that I changed my perspective the more that began to get the sense that it was resisting that simple reinscription. It refused my simple attempts at situating it as a simple representational image. I could only ever take in a portion at a time; the image was fleeting as it moved counter to inescapable glare and the difficulty of its physical properties.

It wasn't just the glare and polished pewter that disturbed any fully formed viewing. The image I was hunting for is, itself, impossible. Due to the incredibly long exposure time required to capture an image it presents an eccentric space. The first permanent photograph of nature is unnatural; rather than presenting a moment it contains a day long duration with the confused shadows to match. It asks the viewer to view it as it views the world—slowly.

Any attempt at taking this object as merely representational image, though, is sure to be frustrated. The intended viewer, before even laying eyes on the pewter plate, is thoroughly situated by the exhibit. You can hardly make it to the object itself without seeing an image of the reproduction. And the reproduction, rather than an image of the pewter plate is itself an imagining of what the photograph could have captured. So that while the reproduction shows us what the plate perhaps saw what we see is not a representation of nature. The first photograph doesn't represent anything; it doesn't point toward some point in space and time. Instead what I saw was an object viewing the world. It, as it sits framed and under glass, invites the viewer to share with it a particular way of seeing.

"On A Clear Day You Can See Edith Sitwell": Materialism, Affect, and Irony in Photography

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Source: telegraph.co.uk

In 1952, Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) announced intentions to translate her own novel Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) into a Hollywood script. British and American newspapers ran a common story detailing her extravagant costume and monstrous physiognomy at the event: “The statuesque Miss Sitwell appeared in a black gilded cowl (‘I resemble Henry VII strongly—he was an ugly old man’) and a black bombazine floor-length dress, and sported long gilt fingernails. She also wore a topaz ring some two inches square, and her wrists were two huge gold bangles” (TD 49). Click ‘Read More’ to follow the thread of my post on how irony, affect, and materialism provide possible lenses for interpreting the above photograph, which features an icon of English eccentricity and literary modernity across from Marilyn Monroe.

On November 15, 1952, the Times Daily advertised that the “Acid-tongued poet-historian-lecturer Dr. Edith Sitwell” was making a try at the movies: “She did not say she was a bit worried about Hollywood because George Bernard Shaw once warned her that film people are the greatest wolves. . . . ‘My first scene,’ she wants Hollywood and Columbia pictures to know, ‘will be most appallingly morbid” (TD 49). As much as her theatrical costumes and demeanor may suggest, Edith Sitwell was not cut out for Hollywood. Over the winter of 1952–53, she wrote letters to T.S. Eliot about her discomforts on Sunset Boulevard: “I looked forward immensely to being in Hollywood, but everyone I have met has done their best to terrify me. I was told yesterday that people of my height are frequently drowned walking along the street, by a sudden downpour of rain.” Sitwell was not only tall, but she suffered from a spinal deformation. She was famed to have spent long bouts at home in bed, writing and reading. When she went in public, she almost always wore decadent and extreme costumes. She described her initial struggles with the Hollywood media to Eliot: “My principal entrancements here are the columns of the lady gossip writers, which I read with avidity. . . . Unable to get at me—because I won’t see them—one wrote ‘A little old lady’ (my italics) ‘has come to Hollywood: Edith Sitwell.’ A man reporter asked me on the telephone: ‘Is it true you are 78?’ I replied, ‘No. Eighty-two.’ But I read last week that you are 78.’ Yes, but that was last week. This week I’m 82” (SL 183). She was 66 at the time. Her script would never be completed as a film, and she slighted industry collaborators as being too artistically naïve and (falsely) “naturalistic” for her tastes. Sitwell’s greatest fame in America (a historical irony and disappointment) likely derived from the above image from Life Magazine.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

After the appearance of the Life Magazine photograph (taken during one 30-minute meeting with Marilyn Monroe in February 1954), Sitwell lamented that the image had made her life an “absolute hell. . . . Some tiresome people will not even let me have any peace. They send letters addressed to her. Newspapers all over the world commented about our meeting. An Egyptian paper went so far as to say I was instructing her in philosophy” (VS 62). A year later, she wrote to her friend, Geoffrey Singleton, on a “Coronation Ode” falsely attributed to her: “It is probably part of my famous friendship with Marilyn Monroe—whom I met once . . . and have not seen since” (SL 200). Despite Sitwell’s disparagement of the staged photo-op and contrived connection to Marilyn Monroe, the photograph itself offers more than just a lively caricature. The flow of gazes and postures in the foreground incorporates a vibrant atmospheric background—a continuity of objects, auras, and things (from Sitwell’s open handbag to the table lamp behind Monroe’s head, from the reflection off of the portrait’s glass plate to the inverted sinking of the couch). The surreal image captures the strangeness of Edith Sitwell's arrival in Hollywood.

Source: npgprints.org

The part of the Life Magazine photograph that compels my interest is the open handbag, which is obscured by the LIFE logo in the magazine’s website archive. This handbag makes the scene more touching, human, and potentially ironic (as in the “Egyptian paper,” which suggested Edith was teaching Marilyn philosophy). I wonder, what was in that bag? Sitwell herself was fascinated by the role of the material objects and curiosity in personal biography. In her novel, English Eccentrics: A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women, she cherishes and enshrines what she describes as an “eccentricity [that] exists particularly in the English. . . . [It] takes many forms. . . . [and may] indeed be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection” (EE 16). Her scholarship shares characteristics with her self-presentation, for Sitwell raises obscure objects and traditions to aesthetic, psychological, and cultural significance. From her morbid chapter on a lock of Milton’s hair (“On the Benefits of Posthumous Fame”) to that on Beau Brummel (“Some Amateurs of Fashion”)—a dandy upon whose coat “Lord Byron is said to have remarked, ‘You might almost say the body thought” (EE 15).

Source: npg.org.uk

If we discount Marilyn Monroe, few individuals of the twentieth century have been more accomplished in the realm of “pictorial eccentricity” than Edith Sitwell. Outside of the costume, makeup, and drama so central to her photographic archive, the Tate Collections also hold two intensely private portraits, by Pavel Tchelitchew (below) and Percy Wyndham Lewis (above). Instead of the handbag, it is Sitwell’s hands that are unique in the portraits. Her hands remained unfinished at the center of Lewis’s painting, for she ceased to sit for him after he intimidated her. In the painting of her close friend, two floating right hands sign on a board behind Sitwell. This painting surprised William Carlos Williams so much that Tchelitchew had to assure him, “She is like that . . . A very beautiful woman. She is alone. She is very positive and emotional. She takes herself very seriously and seems as cold as ice. She is not so” (ES 89). Sitwell’s pictorial legacy has lived on in the sympathetic adoption and branding of artists such as Morrissey, however, she is underappreciated in our contemporary culture of images and ideas.

Source: 2.bp.blogstpot.com

Roland Barthes distinguishes the affective tug of photographs as a “punctum” (point, puncture) that disturbs the “studium” of a photographic appeal to “average effect” and the “rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture” (CL 26). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes outlines the “punctum”: “A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points” (CL 26–27). It is my opinion that a visual analysis of the photograph from Life Magazine ought to move beyond the aesthetic contrasts of the “studium” to consider the “punctum” of the handbag. Those readers curious of Edith Sitwell’s fascinating collection of letters, notebooks, images, drafts, and novels (I’ve been looking at some of these recently) can find them at the Harry Ransom Center, where her archive is held.

Source: 29.media.tumblr.com

Works Cited:

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strouss, and Giroux, 1981)

Lehman, John and Derek Parker, eds., Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, 1919–1964 (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1970).

Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Oresko Books, 1979).

Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics: A gallery of weird and wonderful men and women (New York: Penguin, 1958).

Times Daily “Watch Out Hollywood, Dr. Edith Sitwell is coming from England,” Nov.15, 1952.

The Vancouver Sun “Harried Dame Edith Insists She’s NOT Marilyn’s Friend” June 29, 1955.