viz.

Image credit: Nebojsa Seric Shoba

"Battle of Waterloo. Belgium. 1815"

Lens, The New York Times 

Over the past two weeks, Lens, the photography and photojournalism blog component of the New York Times, has featured two different photographic collections concerned with memory, trauma, and war.  Nebojsa Seric Shoba's "Battlefields" is comprised of images of former battle sites.  Shoba returned to photograph the places where the Battle of Brooklyn (1776) or the Battle of Waterloo (1815) were fought.  Rather than return to earlier places, Maciek Nabrdalik took portraits of Holocaust survivors, focusing closely on the faces of his subjects as they are lit against a stark black background.  Both sets of images press the viewer to consider the possibilities and failures inherent in any attempt to make memory visible.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

When my friend Lauren pointed out to me the following TED video on “photos that changed the world,” I thought that it would be good material for viz.  What I hadn’t realized was where Jonathan Klein’s claims would take my thinking.

Image credit: Underwood and Underwood 

Over past week, as I reworked a syllabus for a course on Photography and Literature, I spent some time skimming through the online finding aids and databases that catalog the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.  The Stereograph collection at the HRC seems particularly fascinating—it contains over 4,000 images, most of which date to the period between 1870 and 1900.  Introducing students to stereographs can form a jumping off point for considering the intersections of vision, modernity, science and technology, early photography, and tourism.

Image Credit: David Halliday on samuseum.org

Photographer David Halliday's current exhibition of still lifes at the San Antonio Museum of Art contains some stunningly beautiful and surreal photographs of food. It also lends itself to use in the rhetoric classroom and could be used for teaching lessons about visual literacy, changing contexts and visual rhetoric within communities. More about Halliday, still life and possible classroom uses after the break.

On the Viz. blog  September 2009, Viz. Editor Noel Radley discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming.

Image credit: Screen shot of Magnum Photos Digital Collection

H/T: Katherine Feo and George Royer

On Tuesday, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center announced that the Magnum collection of photographs would be catalogued, housed, and made accessible to scholars for research and to the public through exhibitions.  Magnum Photos was founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson and several other photographers as one of the first photographic cooperatives.  While the Magnum website hosts the “living archive” of over 500,000 images in a searchable digital library that is updated daily, the HRC will preserve and make available the nearly 200,000 original press prints including several vintage prints dating back more than 60 years.  In a press release announcing the partnership between the HRC, Magnum Photos, and the new owner of the original press prints, Michael S. Dell’s private investment firm MSD Capital, Dr. Tom Staley—director of the Humanities Research Center noted, "This is a singularly valuable collection in the history of photography [that] brings together some of the finest photojournalists of the profession and spans more than a half century of contributions to the medium.  We are delighted to make these remarkable materials accessible to researchers and students."

Susan Sontag: from On Photography to Regarding the Pain of Others    

This semester, while teaching a course called "Photographic Narratives" for the Plan II Honors Program at UT Austin, I organized a panel of four top local photographers. One of the panelists, Sarah Wilson, brought work from her BLIND PROM series, which precipitated a discussion of ethics and the history of photography.