viz.

Graffiti by Banksy, Image via Holy Taco

As many of Banksy's works show, graffiti can convey social commentary. For example, the painting above, which shows a city worker sandblasting the famous Lascaux cave paintings just as he would modern day graffiti, wittily laments the blindness of local governments to public art.

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

WTF, by Dominic Episcopo, from Meat America

Dominic Episcopo wants to explain to you "the indefinable adjective that is 'American'." And as far as he's concerned, the best way to do that is with meat.  The images are funny, deeply ironic, and often ambiguous given Episcopo's purported mission. 

Rodney Torres, 50-50 through Love Sculpture, image from Quartersnacks

Street skaters love architecture. Few people other than architects notice or appreciate the designs in concrete, marble, metal, and brick that comprise a city, but seen through a skater's eyes, lines of movement appear everywhere. Ledges, stairs, hand rails, and even (or especially) smooth concrete and marble elicit a joyful recognition of possibilities. Rather than an agglomeration of static structures, the city becomes an invitation to motion; the skater desires contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment. Assemblage of body, board, and buildings: a intimate becoming, in love with (the) concrete.

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

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

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

Flyer by BagNewsNotes

We wanted to share news about an international webinar hosted by BagNewsNotes forthcoming Sunday March 20th at 12 noon CST.  You can register ahead of time for this important online discussion of images from the Egyptian revolution.  For more about BagNewNotes, read our first viz. post from the spring semester.  See also our previous discussion about how the New York Times represented the early days of the protests in Egypt.

Steve Davis, via Lens

As a sort of continuation of my post two weeks ago about The Goggles' Welcome to Pine Point, I want to focus this week on Steve Davis' As American Falls. This series of photos documents American Falls, the now-declining Idaho town where Davis grew up. Davis describes the town's death as "as slow as it is unspectacular," and these images produce a feeling of stillness that differs in interesting ways from the retroactive intimacy that the Goggles' project produces.

(Photo credits:  The Athlete by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein, via SocImages)

Thanks to fitness magazines and the weight loss industry, we've become acculturated to the notion that fitness looks a certain way.  This photo collection by Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein challenges our assumptions about athleticism by presenting Olympic athletes with an array of body types, ranging from the typical "shredded" bodybuilder look to bodies that we might view as "unhealthy" in a different context. 

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

No, this isn't a photo-essay about the box of human heads found on a Southwest Airlines flight last June.  But it's still a bit creepy.  The ominous and evocative image above is from series of photos by Zackary Canepari, documenting the construction of Real Dolls - anatomically correct mannequins that run about $6,000 for those in the market.  Not safe for work content after the jump.