viz.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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.

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 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: 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: 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?" 

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.