viz.

Image Credit: Cyndicyanide

[Note: Spoilers below the cut.]

As a Game of Thrones fan, I was pretty excited to watch this last week’s episode. It’d been a while since I’d watched, and the wedding of Joffrey Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell gathered together many of the show’s beloved characters.

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.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center Photo by Anthony Maddaloni

Near the sorth-eastern quadrant of the Harry Ransom Center is a series of images of a jockey throttling a racehorse: Eadweard Muybridge's "Horse in Motion." While these images may seem inconspicuous juxtaposed to Dorothea Lange's eminently recognizable photographs, their ability to bear witness to a horse's motion was both evidence of an event and a monumental event in itself. The product of two men's obsessions, "Horse in Motion" is both a fascinating example of a visual argument and a foundational episode in the history of motion pictures.

Image Credit: F--- Yeah Ryan Gosling

Some recent procrastinating led me to Jezebel and thus Joey Thompson’s recent YouTube video, in which he teaches men how to look like actor Ryan Gosling. I was intrigued because I have been following the proliferating Ryan Gosling memes for a while—which have gone on long enough that they’ve been accused of jumping the shark.  Still, I’d like to take some time to think a little bit about what their newest evolutions might tell us about memes, form, and feminine desire.

Image by Stephen von Worley

Last week, I wrote about the power of cold-war era maps when it comes to visualizing Western attitudes towards the Soviet bloc, and, in the work of William Bunge, visualizing themselves.  This week I want to continue my trip down critical cartography's rabbit-hole with an overview of maps that attempt to locate forms of the "American experience."  How can aspects of daily life in America be represented visually?  The following maps try to answer that question, in playful, political, and subversive ways.

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.

Image Credit: Evan Sung for the New York Times

A recent article in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times led me to rethink the importance of visual culture in the current round of debates about food in America. In a shift from the usual conversation about how food is deceitfully misrepresented in branding or advertising, the article at hand got me thinking about the role played by the visual presentations of actual meals. Thinking about plating allows us to revisit the relationship between food and visual culture and reimagine sight as a creative component of foodways—instead of a predatory marketing ploy—with the potential to positively impact the ways we eat. 

Screenshot Credit: YouTube

Zounds!  After Noel’s heartwarming welcome-back posting, I feel reinvigorated and ready to begin posting again here at viz.  I did rest my blogging muscles over the break, but managed to take a few notes for what will hopefully be more piquant posts on pop culture.

Recently, my friends have helpfully provided me with such a deluge of musical material that I don’t know what to do with it all.  My friend Cate Blouke forwarded me the NPR story about HOPE: The Obama Musical, which delights me to no end—but I was a little more intrigued by a video my friend Meghan Andrews brought to my attention—a short-form musical YouTube video that doubles as a Yale advertisement called “That’s Why I Chose Yale.”

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.