viz. - Documentary Photography

What would Proust do with Google Maps?

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

In David Sasake's blog post, "How to read Google Earth like Proust," he notes that Marcel Proust liked to read train timetables before bed. According to Alain de Botton, "[T]he mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust's imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields." Place names can float up in our subconsciousness, rekindling memories long forgotten like rabbits pulled out of a magician's hat. So what would Proust make of Google Maps, and especially Google's massive, ongoing "Street View" function, where an ever-expanding swath of the globe is mapped, photographed, and instantly accessible? What happens when you can view almost anyplace, anytime?

Screenshot from Google Maps

I'm asking because I spent the afternoon visiting places from my past, not in reality, but through Google Maps. That house above, appropriately blurry, is the house I lived in as a small child. Though hazy, as with memory, I can visit it anytime online; though I'm now some eight hundred miles and twenty years away from it. I can retake my morning walk to serve 6 am mass at the Catholic church, if I want. Or, as below, I can recreate the drives into the country that I--and every other underage smoker with a car--took on summer days a decade ago.

Screenshot from Google Maps

Or I can, if I want, stand at the very street corner where I said goodbye for the last time to my first college girlfriend (on a day when the shadows of the trees stretched out across the street in just the same way as below). But Google Street view is fickle: though I can wave goodbye forever, I can't (yet) stand at the streetcorner where I first met my wife.

Screenshot from Google Maps

And though I can stare down the street above forever--where, while being mugged at gunpoint, once upon a time I thought that empty billboard might be the last thing I would ever see--I can't at the moment recreate the view from my Catholic school's parking lot, or see the park my teenage friends and I would sneak out to after curfew.

The street view function of Google Maps seems tailor made for such Proustian reveries. Like memories, it's full of gaps. Places that you ought to be able to find aren't there. Places you never thought you'd see again are suddenly at your fingertips. What fascinates me is the power to recreate: to walk down streets you'd long forgotten and to recognize the incongruous, some detail that brings the past flooding back to you. Like so much on the internet today, there are whole communities dedicated to this kind of recovery of the past, though my favorite is Ogle Earth. I found it through Sasaki's aforementioned blog, and it's well worth checking out. Using Google Maps, Stefan Geens has mapped out one of the Hippie Trail routes through Afghanistan--a virtual recreation of a (now seemingly-impossible) past. Similarly, the website What Was There overlays historical information--particularly photography-- onto current Google Maps, allowing the user to "see" the past.

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

Though not yet a part of history, Jon Rafman's sometimes haunting (see the photograph at the top of this piece), sometimes comic, sometimes somewhere-between-the-two (see the photograph above) cullings from Google Street View seem a fitting place to end this post. Rafman's work, the best of which is featured here along with an excellent essay here, collapses the distinctions between the utilitarian and social value of Google's project and the "street photography" movement that flourished in Cartier-Bresson's wake. Rafman's images seem pulled from a collective (Proustian?) unconscious that also happens to be the obhjective world around us. He winnows out of the omnidirectional impassive cameras attached to Google's vehicles images that provoke social consciousness, laughter, even an occasional mystical awe at the world around us. Strangely enough, the seemingly quixotic, because practical, goal of Google Maps--the ability to plan routes in any part of the globe--has become a repository for half-a-decade's worth of what Cartier-Bresson would refer to as "decisive moments."

On representing "the city and its women": An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part I)

ebfrye — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:17:33 +0000

via "Women of Troy," In Verse on vimeo

A few months ago, I happily stumbled upon and blogged about poet, scholar, and UT alum Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s docu-poetry project “Women of Troy.” Recently, Susan kindly took a break from her busy semester of writing and teaching to have coffee with me. We talked about multimedia poetics, issues of representation, the complications of collaboration, and the role of technology in the poetry classroom. Because the transcript of our interview is rather long, you can read Part I of our conversation below. I'll post the second installment next week. After that you'll also be able to find the interview in its entirety on our "Views" page.

First, a word about the "Women of Troy" project:

In 2009, Somers-Willett teamed up with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski to represent the experiences of women living below the poverty line in Troy, New York. The collaboration aired on Public Radio International/WNYC program Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen and BBC Radio, and a print version appeared with Kenneally's photographs in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Among multiple honors, “Women of Troy” received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media in 2010.

More about Susan:

Susan is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry and a book of criticism. Her first book of poetry, Roam, won the Crab Orchard Review Award series in 2006 and was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for poetry. Her second book, Quiver, published in 2009 with the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Series in Poetry, received the 2010 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2009 and has been cited by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. Her writing has been featured by The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Our talk:

EF: Tell me a little bit about the process of putting together "Women of Troy." How did you come to the project?

SSW: I had a call from Ted Genoways, editor-in-chief of VQR. He had been talking with Lu Olkowski about doing some multimedia pieces in the vein of Kwame Dawes’s work with the Pulitzer Center. Ted was also connected with Brenda Ann Kenneally who hails from the Troy area and has been documenting women in that community for 6 -7 years now. He had known all of us in those various spheres and brought us together. Lu and Ted had been talking about putting together a series of documentary poetry projects with the multimedia elements of radio and photography. “Women of Troy” was the first of those projects.

My introduction to the project and Troy, New York was visual, through Brenda’s photographs, or some of them at least. What I saw in those photographs was stark and shocking and challenging for me as someone who identified as a white, middle class woman, and I knew that was exactly why I needed to do the project because it would and has caused me to think about class in much more conscious ways.

EF: Do you remember which photographs you saw first and which images you found to be most striking?

SSW: I saw a slideshow of Brenda’s work that someone had put together. I remember a photograph of a mother (whom I would later learn was Kayla), father, and baby. The father had a huge knife laying on his belly. I later found out it was a toy knife. I also saw an image of a woman lying on a bed holding a gun. I assumed it was real, but I don’t know. Those weapons really stuck with me the first time I saw Brenda’s work. I felt that there was a threat there.

I saw pictures of children living in only what I could describe as squalor, in these bare, crumbling backgrounds. Their environments seemed so chaotic, but later I found out they were moving all the time. That was my one trepidation when I was thinking about going into this environment, but it was never as dangerous as those photographs necessarily depict.

So, when I think about my first impressions of looking at those photographs, it’s actually kind of funny to me, knowing what I know now about Troy. In a lot of ways, these women are just like you or me, loving their families fiercely and trying to get by with what they have, and often I identified with them more than I felt an economic or social divide. At other times, the economic divide was very sharp, but the social divide still felt distant and I never felt threatened. I think my experience of that environment and the very specific vision that Brenda is promoting or trying to get across in her photographs is different. She sees herself as someone who got out of that community. She has a different perspective on how she wants those women to be represented. She wants them to get out and educate themselves and still be tough and mean and still have their street cred. but not be trapped in that cycle of poverty and gossip and all of the she said/she said that’s there. My main goal was to observe, and to do my best not to paternalize or exploit. It’s not that Brenda’s and my goals are mutually exclusive; I just think we had different processes and agendas.

Photograph, Brenda Ann Keneally, from Upstate Girls

What was your writing process like? How did it dovetail with Brenda Ann Kenneally’s process?

SSW: Brenda was shooting the entire time that we were there. I was there for a week in May and then I left for a month and wrote 24/7. Then went back in early June for another ten days and then wrote for another month. My time in Troy wasn’t like sitting down have and having coffee over an interview. It was real fieldwork. We were staying up until 3:00 in the morning at times. I was staying up with Billie Jean partying with her friends and then getting up to ride with D.J. to drop her kids off at school at 7:00 a.m. The schedule was grueling and I got really sick at the end.

When I was in Troy, I was with Brenda who was already accepted as a member of that community. She hails from that area. She talks like the gals in Troy and has their swagger. So who knows what I would have experienced if we hadn’t worked as a team, but I feel that Brenda gave us the credentials to be in that community and for those subjects to accept us. I feel that we would not have been as able to get as deep and entangled in their lives if it had not been for her inviting us in, and I am very grateful for that.

EF: For how many of the photographs were you present? How did that change your writing process?

SSW: I don’t know if I can give you a number because there were so many different productions. I think the majority of photographs were taken before.

One of the things that I learned in my time there watching Brenda photograph is that she directs her subjects not to smile. I remember being very vividly being in a house documenting a teenage girl and Brenda kept saying, “No smiles! No smiles!” It was like seeing the man behind the curtain, or the woman behind the curtain in this case, in the production of that image because it underscored the constructed-ness of documentary images, but I think she does it in a very powerful way that has no equal. She says what she wants to say with those images.

EF: Were you involved in the editing process? Did you know what photographs would be paired with your poems? In what order?

SSW: I was not involved in the editing at all, and it’s probably a good thing. That was Lu’s doing, and she hired filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar to edit it together. The input that I did have—I had written “Women of Troy,” and I had seen a show Brenda had done at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, a non-profit, in an old converted church in Troy. They fund and sponsor community projects, and their building is right across the street from the main house where all of the gossip and stuff goes on, where Kayla lives with her family, where everybody goes and talks, gathers. That stoop is always crowded. Roseanne, Billie Jean’s mother, lived in the unfinished basement of that house at the time. But, the Sanctuary supports Brenda’s work quite a bit. They had a show called Upstate Girls, which is Brenda’s continuing project, a show of all of her photographs, D.J.’s photographs, Dana’s photographs. They were able to open it up to the community, and the women could write on the wall around the photographs and have a conversation with those images.

I had seen that show and there were a few key specific photographs that I reference in the poems. The last image of “Women of Troy” is of this young girl holding a sparkler. I knew that would go well with the last stanza of the poem, “You are the city and its women/ wailing darkly and bright to bless/ your city as it burns, this city/made of your light.” So, although I gave one or two suggestions about what images might correspond to the poem, most of the images spring from their own contexts rather than being literal referents.

In another poem, “A Call to Arms,” the very last image in that poem stems from a photograph of Billie Jean. The last few lines are about a women going down the block to take the beating someone says she deserves and the photograph is Billie Jean receiving a pocketknife from a friend of hers as she is preparing to go down the block and take the beating. That was one of the few literal referents I included.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: How were issues of representation involved for you as a poet and as a collaborator?

SSW: I don’t really know how these women would choose to represent themselves [visually]. The dialogic aspect of this project really attracted me because I knew that through the radio and the audio aspect that we would be able to hear their voices.

I discovered that there’s a thin line on appropriating voices, and the line always seems to be moving. I kept asking myself, “What’s the right way to represent the women? Should I be representing them at all?” At AWP, Erika Meitner was talking about trying to avoid “ruin porn” in writing about photographs of Detroit. The bottom line is you don’t want to fetishize the aspect of of a subject’s experience simply because it’s edgy or shocking for a particular readership, even though that response is probably inevitable for some folks.

Lu and I got to know these women as women and as friends, and we got to know their families. Nothing’s ever easy in the field of documentary studies, but that was an aspect that attracted me to the project. I knew that through the audio tracks that we would hear their voices, too. I knew that it wouldn’t just be me speaking or representing their voices, and I hoped that it would turn into a conversation.

Something that I found was really interesting was that some audiences had heard only the radio pieces, which had some interviews with the women introducing the poems that I had read and an interview the Brenda. The poems were intercut with interview and audio, so it was an interesting use of multimedia. Of the women that we had profiled, all identified as white, but there were a number of people who assumed that they were black because of their idioms and accents. One of my colleagues asked, “How does it feel as a white person documenting black women?”—a question that’s very valid, but that also revealed that my colleage had made some assumptions linking class, race, and language in very specific ways. We had a great discussion about it, actually.

The appropriation of voice is something that I am very conscious of in writing these pieces. I felt like I had to be very conscious of staying true to what Dana, Billie Jean, and D.J. would say and be sensitive about how they might want to be represented. The feedback that we’ve gotten from them is pretty much “Yeah, that’s about right.” I’m hoping that we did a good, sensitive job, but it’s something that we all worry about. When you’re doing something with people who are in a relatively less empowered position than you are, you have to think about those questions or you’re not doing your job.

I think that we were women profiling with women in a community where there is a profound absence of men (because the men were in prison or had just skidaddled) was important to the project. Now, that’s not to say that I think a male could not engage with this work but that it would be somewhat different.

EF: So does the poet have an obligation to the subject? How is this similar or different from the photographer’s?

SSW: Of course, but the kind of obligationdepends on the poet and the photographer. One of the things that we discovered through this project—this project was really hard to do because so many different moving parts—we discovered we had different creative projects and ways to get work done. Personally, I learned a lot about audio production. I learned a lot about Brenda’s visual and technical processes and different approaches that have to do with the kinds of artists that we are. I needed more reflection and time to observe in a silent manner. I knew that I needed more time than I had to hole up and write. Lu’s process is about seducing you to say the right thing to get the radio piece to work in a coherent way. It’s about being around people, and talking, talking, talking, pulling it out of the interviewee. Brenda--her process is different. She crosses more lines than most documenters would cross by giving somebody five dollars for gas or a ride here and there because she’s a member of that community, because she’s an insider and that determines how anyone would approach it. And I think that’s OK too. The question of insider/outsider may be the more important question about how to approach the documentary work than whether you are a poet or photographer.

EF: So how is it different for the insider versus the outsider?

SSW: I’m thinking of Brenda getting embroiled in all the drama, their fistfights and all of their mama drama. There’s a lot of baby mama drama, or, as Billie Jean would say, “baby mother and baby father drama.” She’s very proper about that, which ended up being part of my poem. Billie Jean called it that, so that’s why it’s in there.

I’m thinking about [the insider/outsider question] in contrast to Brenda’s photographs, which are very stark and tell a specific message. I wanted to complement that vision, but I wanted to represent moments where these women did feel empowered. My goal is not to contradict but to enrich and complicate the singular vision of the photograph. I think the piece of Billy Jean at the Flag Day parade, the “Just a Girl” poem, is a step in that direction. There was one night we piled into D.J.’s minivan and went to Schenectady, NY and they got all dressed up in their tight pants and g-strings. We had a good time. We had a girl’s night out. Brenda photographed that, and it made it into the poem, photos of that evening when we went out to the club. There’s a picture of D.J. dancing, and my back’s to the camera.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: Do you consider these pieces to be ekphrastic? You’ve made ekphrasis part of your work elsewhere. How does this process compare with other ekphrastics you’ve done, ex. for the Landmarks program and the Blanton Museum's Poetry Project?

SSW: I’ve automatically assumed that they are but not in the traditional way, as in, “Here’s a piece of visual art. I’m going to represent it in my poem.” It’s a different kind of take because we were working collaboratively and we were creating our respective works of art at the same time. So, some of it is ekphrastic. Some of it, yes, in the more traditional sense. For instance, there were three or four images, that I had already seen. Some of them ended up in the poem or references to them. Lu tends to represent this approach as a new way of storytelling, but it’s a new take on ekphrasis, too. The visual art pre-exists the poems, but some of them are being created at the same time. Some of the photos are taken afterwards. I think the possibility to call it ekphrasis is definitely there but not wholly in the traditional sense. I am interested in pushing the envelope in what the process of ekphrasis means.

Plato talks about ekphrasis as involving one representation in art and then a second ideal representation of that representation in literature, and then a third ideal representation, ad infinitum--basically an infinite regress of mirrors. But here we’re asking, “What happens when those representations are parallel, when they are being created in parallel forms in parallel time? What prism of ekphrastic perspective can emerge through collaboration? And can it be more than merely mimetic?”

One of the ways that I want to complicate and trouble ekphrasis is to add reflection on process—on creation as well as representation. Thinking about that parallelism between poetry and photograph rather than having a linear distance between them helps to do that. “Women of Troy” is as much about photography and representation as it is about these particular women. The last few lines, “You are the city and its women/wailing darkly and bright to bless/your city as it burns, this city/made of your light” is of course Troy burning--but it is also the city being populated by Brenda’s photographs, the light and dark of her film and its reproduction.

The way that poem is organized—it’s a litany. It’s image after image. Not all of the lines correspond one to one to a photograph, but it’s like being in a gallery of photographs. I wanted the effect of walking through a gallery and to emphasize the way the city speaks to a viewer through this collection of images.

And that’s what I think poetry and photography share, the language of image, and that’s why there’s such a venerable tradition of the two working together. At the same time, there are a lot of unexplored avenues in working in those two artistic genres. With ekphrasis, I feel like I’ve stumbled upon the great metaphor that will inform most of my writing. I could write a lifetime of work about image and representation.

Screen shot, "Women of Troy" via vimeo

EF: Aside from ekphrasis, these pieces seem to touch the borders of other forms. I’m thinking elegy, ode. They also form a sort of archive.

SSW: We definitely took it as a documentary project and certainly what Brenda is doing is archiving these women’s lives. A big goal of her Upstate Girls project is to basically follow these women and their daughters through growing up as children and then becoming mothers themselves. She wants to see one generational turn, and she’s not that far away from it, actually.

EF: You’ve probably noticed that many of my questions deal with characterizing the form of this piece. I find that the complicated form pays tribute to the lives of these women, in a way. Did you find that, in order to pay full tribute to these women’s experiences, it was necessary to use multiple forms?

SSW: I don’t think it’s necessary. I think you can pay tribute in whatever genre, whatever artistic mode. However, I think the fact that we did undertake a multifaceted, complex mode that reached many artistic modes and genres, we made it a better documentary project because you could have a conversation of women on the radio that you couldn’t have anywhere else. You could have my poem and Billie Jean talking right back to each other. I could add a counter-anchor to Brenda’s photos to show empowerment as well as moments of strife and struggle.

I don’t think my poems would be as strong as they are if they were not running alongside the work of my collaborators, Lu and Brenda. Can you pay tribute in single genres? Of course, and they do. But, they speak so much more powerfully in concert.

EF: I know you’re also interested in orality, aurality, and the role of the performance. Do you view these videos or photograph/ video combos as a kind of performance?

SSW: Oh lordy! Well, let me tell you a story. I was living in Austin the summer I was writing these poems, and so Lu arranged for me to go to the KUT studio on the UT campus to record my poems. We spent a four-hour, marathon session recording four or five poems that she would then edit down. I have a background in doing performance poetry on slam stages, so I got ready for it. I rehearsed and practiced reading the poems aloud and got it so that they would sound good on the radio. Then I got into the studio, and Lu had hired an audio editor, Emily Botein, to help her with the project. She and Emily were on the phone, and I would say three lines, and then they would say, “Make this sound less like poetry. You’re reading this too much like a poet.” It was so frustrating! But, in a good way. We had this marathon session, trying to get me to sound less like a poet. It was pretty hilarious, and it was frustrating at the time, but looking back on it, it was really funny. It was because they were approaching it from a very expert position of being producers creating a radio narrative that worked from start to finish. I didn’t know at the time that Lu was thinking of inter-splicing women’s interviews with my own voice. It had to be a very specific delivery. I think they were trying to erase my voice of any affect, which is hard for a poet, even someone as down-to-earth as me. When you have a certain line break or slant rhyme, you have an unconscious desire as a poet to highlight it, I guess.

When Lu put together the multimedia piece, I had already recorded “Women of Troy.” She tried and tried to make my audio work, but something wasn’t clicking. So Lu asked Brenda--who hails from that area and sounds like those women--to read and record the poem. When you hear the piece, it’s Brenda’s voice you hear, and I think it works. I didn’t quite know how to feel about it at first. I felt a little bit of ownership of the piece, but once I played it and sat with it, I realized it was the right choice. I think poets and really all of us have an attachment—maybe it’s the cult of the author era that we are in—to the idea that the author has some ultimate authority over the work. You think you know what it’s supposed to sound like or mean, and this was an instance where that boundary was crossed and challenged for the better.

I learned that—surprise!--someone else can do a better job than me with my own work. The collaboration opened me up to more possibilities for how the poem can sound--the way I think about it may not be the best way. It was a very, very good lesson to learn.

The Impermanent Art of Graffiti

Michael Widner — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

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.

The antagonism between government and graffiti artists is understandable; we cannot expect government officials to determine what is art and what is vandalism. At the same time, graffiti is public art to be encouraged, not suppressed. The longstanding criminality of the form makes it ideal for subsersive and counter-cultural messages. Even so, alongside simple, unappealing tags or wall-sized, astoundingly intricate paintings of pseudonyms, graffiti that bears an explicit message stands out. While Banksy's skillful works transmit these messages with a vigorous and unique style that accounts for much of his popularity, this type of work is seen elsewhere.

I discover such didactic art throughout Austin. The guiding philosophy rejects consumerism and conformity. I came across two particularly nice examples yesterday, while walking along the Pfluger pedestrian bridge over Town Lake:

"Breathe" is a call for mindfulness and focus within a series of images seemingly unconnected by anything other than style and color. "Robots" playfully suggests that we already act like robots without realizing it.

As Nate Kreuter notes in his post on graffiti, a key element is the audacity of the artist. Painting this train bridge surely counts as daring. A KXAN news report about the water rescue required for a tagger who jumped from it after being caught in broad daylight exemplifies the dangers. The reporter calls the artist a "graffiti vandal" and notes his bongos were also found; she thus makes it clear that this individual and, by extension, the art form in which he was engaged, is deviant and deserving of mockery.

But note the height of the bridge from which he jumped:

Why would someone take such a risk to create public art that many consider mere vandalism, art that the city will surely blast away within weeks if not days? The transitory nature of this form has led websites like Art Crimes to try and preserve via photographs the various pieces, including some in Austin. Here are two paintings by the same artist (Gomer) in the same place:

"Gomer" images via Art Crimes

The impermanence of the medium is, itself, part of the meaning. Not only must we reflect on the formal characteristics and the explicit or implicit messages, but also the effort put forth by an artist who knows the work will disappear. The result is an anonymous, altruistic art that momentarily beautifies and provokes before its inevitable destruction.

History Written on the Body: Of Another Fashion

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:26:31 +0000

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life Magazine, via Of Another Fashion

This week, I want to focus on a site I discovered when I was trying not to work. While browsing fashion blogs, I encountered Of Another Fashion, a digital archive of "the not quite hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of US women of color." In recuperating these women as alternative icons, the site emphasizes the complex historical intersections of public and private as they play out through clothing choices. It also provides needed role models to counter the often problematic and still white-dominated fashion industry.

Personal collection of Lisa Henderson; via Of Another Fashion

The site features both photos from other archives, like the Library of Congress, and images from contributors' personal collections. Blog author Minh-Ha T. Pham includes whatever information is available about the image and its subject, and these stories, even when brief, are one of the most enthralling parts of the project. For example, the image above is of the contributors' great grandmother, Bessie Henderson, who died in 1911 at the age of 19. The contributor tells us

She lived on a small farm with her ailing grandparents. Her arms are burned dark from work in the sun, but she would have shielded her fair face with a bonnet or straw hat. The lockets mystify and sadden me. Neither my grandmother nor her sister ever saw them. They had nothing of their mother’s, save this picture. (Lisa Henderson)

Photo by Francis Stewart, via Of Another Fashion

The image above, taken in 1942, shows a Labor Day fashion show at Tule Lake Relocation Center, an internment camp in California. The image highlights the day-to-day survival strategies of women in a very difficult situation. The staging of a fashion show in particular places the emphasis on beauty, play, and modernity, but also labor. Women within the camp would have made most of the dresses; in some cases, women probably modeled what they made, thereby showing not only their beauty but also their virtuosity.

Personal collection of Rosemary Garrido; via Of Another Fashion

Making fashion the focus of an alternative history gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of these women and how they were shaped by both personal desires and broader historical forces. For me, this blog really highlights the complex conditions that produce the visual rhetoric of fashion.

Where Children Sleep - James Mollison's Diptychs

Michael Widner — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:37:26 +0000

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."

I can easily imagine multiple pedagogical uses for these arresting photographs. For the target audience, what better way to get children to contemplate socioeconomic diversity than through comparison with something they no doubt have never given much though to? By grounding the lesson in something as intimate as where one sleeps, with the attendant expression of identity common to bedrooms, the photographs carry great emotional power. There are examples of excess and predominantly one-note identities:

There are also images of povery like the opening image for this post:

Although Mollison notes that he wants the children to stand as equals before the neutral background, I'm not convinced he succeeds. The traces of their material and cultural embeddedness are never fully erased. Clothes, tools, bags, jewelry, and other accoutrements invariably mark each child. Rather than a shocking discongruity, the two images in each diptych seem, for the most part, to fit. Each child appears removed from her or his environment, but not essentially separate from it. Does this visual continuity between child and sleeping place represent a failure on the artist's part or the impossibility of the task?

Reboot: Innocence and Exploitation: Kids with Cameras by Andi Gustavson

ebfrye — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 21:49:10 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot of viz.

This past week, I had the privilege of listening to Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Natasha Trethewey, and Kwame Dawes give a reading/ panel at AWP on their work that I have discussed in recent posts (here and here). The panel was moderated by VQR editor Ted Genoways and also included the poet Erika Meitner who is currently collaborating with a photographer on a project involving Detroit. I'm preparing a longer, related post to appear in the coming weeks, but, in the meantime, I've been thinking about issues of representation raised by those pieces and how the combined effect of literary and visual gazes transforms the stakes for subject, viewer, poet, photographer, and editor. In that frame of mind, I'm re-booting Andi Gustavson's provacative post on the power dynamics of documentary films that feature children. Writing about Born into Brothels, Andi is concerned with how "the viewer is invited into the film in a position of power." Surely, such a consideration can be extended to the "readers" of these projects.

Start of Andi's original post:

Image credit: screen shot of The New Orleans Kids with Camera Project

For our class on social documentary film, we screen Martin Bell’s Streetwise—a documentary that follows young homeless kids through their daily routines. Our class discussion always considers the question of consent and the issue of exploitation with subjects who are so young. This is an issue that always arises when there are cameras trained on kids—recently, however, we also considered the question of training kids to work with cameras. Over the last several years there have been many projects that seek to empower children by providing them with cameras and an opportunity to discuss their artwork. The New Orleans Kid Camera Project attempts to offer an “unfiltered view of New Orleans through the eyes of its youth.” These organizations— for instance, Kids with Cameras and The New Orleans Kid Camera Project and films like Born into Brothels—are surely providing an excellent experience for young people who might not otherwise have had access to cameras and a space to discuss artwork. Although these projects that provide kids with cameras claim to offer a therapeutic experience for participants and access to an innocent vision through the photographs for viewers, many of the issues of consent and exploitation are still at play here.

Image credit: screen shot of website for Born into Brothels

In one of the opening scenes of Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s 2005 documentary film Born into Brothels, an eleven-year-old girl introduces the viewer to her fellow student and herself. She is smiling, and obviously at ease on film. The camera angle is direct, shot at the same level as this young girl. As she narrates the film cuts away to still photographs of the children she is naming. The narration, the angle, the sequencing here all seem to suggest that it is Puja and the other children born to prostitutes in Calcutta’s red light district that are in control of their representation. Certainly Briski and Kauffman’s attempt to empower their subjects by handing over the camera contributes to the sense that this film is an example of unmediated, self-representation and that as such, the film mitigates those power dynamics that typically arise in social documentary photojournalism.

Born into Brothels seems at first to solve some of the disparities in power by inverting the expected relationships of photographer and subject; the young children to which the title refers are given cameras, the filmmaker appears often on screen. However, this documentary does very little self-reflexive questioning of the methods of representation. Rather this film seems to suggest that this inversion provides access to an objective truth. In many ways, Born into Brothels is a respectful, sensitive portrayal of many of these children. In fact, Briski and Kauffman go well beyond the typical level of involved, concerned filmmakers to alleviate the situation of their subjects. Viewers of the film and the film’s website are encouraged to purchase signed prints of the children’s photographs with all of the proceeds going towards their education. Simply because it does a better job than most documentary films at attempting to avoid exploitative situations, does not mean that this representations is unproblematic.

Right from the start, and despite Puja’s seeming narrative control, the viewer is invited into the film in a position of power. There are very few scenes of adults taking care of these kids and so the film asks us to protect them. As Puja tells the camera she will have to join the line of prostitutes and “they say it will be soon” the film encourages the viewer to alleviate her situation. Because the film introduces each child through his or her photographs juxtaposed with scenes of that child in Briski’s photography class, the film offers the viewer a powerful vantage point similar to that of the teacher who must recognize the talent in each child (especially Avijit) and then validate that talent. Setting aside questions concerning the voyeurism that surrounds a filmic excursion into the red light district of a foreign country, and questions concerning permission when documenting the lives of such young people, Born into Brothels still seems problematic in its presentation of the poverty of its subjects. Because the film focuses solely on these few children and what can be done to change their lives, Born into Brothels implies that if the viewer watches, understands, and perhaps contributes to their college funds then all pictured problems will be alleviated. There is no attention paid to the broader structural issues that have created the situation in the first place and no attention is given to any grassroots organizations that may be working to address the same problems in Calcutta’s red light district. This film privileges a model of missionary work in which a white Western woman enters into the third world to save her subjects. It seems that offering the camera to the subject does not entirely alleviate the filmmaker from the burden of representation.

Documenting Need

Megan Eatman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:00:48 +0000

Stefen Chow, The Poverty Line

Earlier this week, I tweeted about Stefen Chow's The Poverty Line, a collection of photographs that documents what an individual can buy with a daily wage of 3.28 yuan (49 cents), and here I want to draw more attention to this project and another like it. In documenting the choices one might face with this daily wage (significantly below the World Bank's poverty line, $1.25/day), Chow dramatizes the plight of the poor while staying within the language of economics and exchange.

Chow's photos are less sentimental than many documentary projects that focus on poverty; there are no crying children or hardened, starving adults. By constructing the viewer as the person confronted with this meager harvest, however, these photos do ask that we consider the daily frustration of making life or death decisions about how to handle limited resources. By making the limits of these funds visible, Chow also makes them real for viewers who might not be able to conceive of what living on 49 cents a day in China would look like.

A similar project by Jonathan Blaustein has a different origin and different rhetorical effects. The Lens blog on the New York Times website reports that Blaustein's The Value of a Dollar began when he realized that both the single and the double cheeseburger cost a dollar at his local fast food joint. The resulting project is a meditation on food as a commodity with a constructed value. The quantities represented are about what you would expect; Blaustein was able to purchase very few organic, early season blueberries and a lot of potted meat, ramen, and white bread, thereby supporting the thesis that it is often cheaper to buy processed food (although, notably, he was able to get a lot of grapefruit).

Jonathan Blaustein, The Value of a Dollar

Perhaps most interesting about this project is the composition; the photos set up the food items without packaging and isolated, with a white background, as if presenting them as art objects. Here, Blaustein's project differs most noticeably from Chow's. Where Chow places food on a newspaper and the viewer above, emphasizing the quotidian nature of this dilemma and allowing for easy comparisons between one food item and another, Blaustein plays with scale, sometimes making it difficult to ascertain how much of, for example, a Burger King side salad one can buy for a dollar.

While both artists ask their viewers to consider food as a commodity, their requests take strikingly different forms. In a pedagogical context, these images might be useful for discussing visual rhetoric and illustrating the argumentative different that subtle changes can make.

In Verse: Are Docu-poems the Poetry of the Future?

ebfrye — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 02:45:50 +0000

Video Credit: "Women of Troy," Susan B.A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally, In Verse

H/T to Noël Radley for introducing me to this project

Last week I posted several video animations of poems read by their authors as part of a recent project by the Poetry Foundation. Today I’d like to draw your attention to In Verse, a series of “documentary poems” put together using the resources of Association of Independents in Radio, Incorporated and Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR).

The first installment, seen above, features the work of UT English Department alum Susan B.A. Somers-Willett and photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally who focus on working mothers in the low-income community of Troy, New York. See also this two-part collaboration ("Congregation, Witness" and "Congregation, Believer") between Pulitzer Prize winner and Gulf Coast native Natasha Trethewey and Joshua Cogan:

I’m struck by the slight variations in sound technique within these “documentary poems.” There’s the very moving moment toward the end of Somers-Willet’s poem when the reader sighs, overwhelmed and very moved, as she exerts some effort to get out the last few lines. In the second piece featuring Trethewey’s work, the reading of the piece is amplified by the inclusion of comments from the woman struggling to rebuild her house, and at the end of the short clip, a train whistle lows.

While I’m used to hearing a supplementary sound track in public radio pieces, it’s a new approach to a poetry “reading” and one that, I think, argues for poetry’s continued use in the world as a way of calling attention to neglected communities. The addition of these various sounds widens the possibilities for affecting viewers, and I’m wondering how much we will see these kinds of multimedia projects as poets seek new ways of reaching and maintaining captive audiences.

Beauty and the Bomb

Megan Eatman — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 16:43:29 +0000

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

Inspired by Eileen's post, I focus this week on a fascinating image. If it weren't for the title of this post, or the image's caption, you might not be able to identify this image. Even with context, I spent a moment staring, attempting to understand how this could be what its caption claimed it was: the beginning stages of a nuclear blast, captured by a special camera placed two miles away from ground zero. In its deviance from the typical mushroom cloud, the image argues for an even more complex understanding of the massive destruction that humans create.

Technically speaking, this image is a close-up; it was captured with a special camera that was placed much closer than a regular camera (or a photographer) could be. But one of the provocative qualities of this image is the way it mimics a much closer close-up. Black and white, with darkness in the background, the image looks like something you might see through an electron microscope. While this aesthetic complicates perception of the actual scale of destruction, it also invokes the incredibly small action from which the massive explosion stems.

For me, the image also invokes the intersection of humanity and technology. The ball, filled with light, exudes a potentiality with no immediate point of origin; it grows on its own, as if alive.

Image: Peter Kuran, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, via The New York Times

This image is particularly explicit in invoking growth and reproduction. The bomb looks as if it is giving birth, but to what? A caption indicates that this image shows a fireball "begin[ning] to destroy the tower that holds the weapon aloft." While the first image, taken at a later stage of the explosion, shows no indication of the weapon's beginning, this image shows the destruction of the support structure, the development of the explosion as an independent entity, and thus hints again at growth. While biological creatures are certainly not the only entities that grow independently, the birthing image seems in particular to invoke human and non-human animal reproduction, providing a stark contrast to the elimination of human life that accompanies such an explosion.

The significance of these biological visual tropes might lead us to a somewhat overtrodden message: nuclear technology destroys its maker, humans are their own worst enemy, etc. I like to think that they can do more than that. If nothing else, they force us to think about an almost unimaginable scale of destruction in a different way, considering its processes and products anew. But there is also a beauty, one that I think complicates the concerns visual scholars have long held about the aestheticization of violence. The combination of beautiful image and historical knowledge might enable the viewer to both appreciate the glories of technology and its very serious consequences.

Reboot: DADT and Public Sacrifice

Megan Eatman — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:33 +0000

Image credit: Chan Lowe, The Lowe Down

The above cartoon, republished yesterday on the artist’s blog, makes a very effective argument against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The use of flag-draped coffins, signifying shared tragedy, suggests that dying for one’s country has little to do with sexual orientation and that is rather the work that an individual does—in this case, sacrificing his/her life for the United States—that matters. In this kind of public sacrifice, the image suggests, everything individual is erased. However, this message seems more complicated when considered in relation to one of Tim Turner's earlier posts and the wider cache of meanings that these coffins suggest.

Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT,2/15/2009

Last year, Tim discussed speculation as to whether President Obama would change Pentagon policy and allow the publication of photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim suggested that this debate was in large part about the tension between public and private sacrifice (a difficulty that the eventual solution addressed), although there are obvious issues of information control as well.

When thought of in the context of public/private tension, Lowe’s cartoon could also be translated as an argument for making these coffins visible, as the coffins signify an act of public sacrifice, the death of a soldier, rather than a man or woman. The suggested erasure here could also be troubling in the debate on DADT. Lowe’s image’s suggestion that being a soldier is an overriding identity seems like it could actually be appropriated as an argument for DADT, suggesting that, in the military, you are a soldier above all else and can therefore be told to conform to gender and sexuality standards. Obviously,that argument is problematic (why these standards?) and extremely discriminatory, but it makes visible some of the complications that arise in the public/private tension around soldiers’ bodies.

Tim’s original piece is below, and here. For more discussion of images and DADT, see this recent post on No Caption Needed.

Start of Tim's post:

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Documenting Crime, Yesterday and Today

Megan Eatman — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:19:33 +0000

Image: Ángel Franco

Via Lens Blog, New York Times

The above image is a part of a series by photographer Ángel Franco that documents the aftermath of violence, but not in the way you might expect. The series, which is published weekly on Lens, the New York Times documentary photography blog, is filled with images that are haunting in large part because of what is not shown.

The images in Franco's series, At the Sirens' End, are all shot in New York City. Each is accompanied by a minimalist caption; the image above, for example, is captioned, "A woman fell--or was pushed--from a 15th floor window in the Mitchel Houses" (Lens). These captions provide context for what might otherwise be a mysterious, if unsettling, scene. Because this image is a close-up shot that eliminates any surrounding officers or crime scene tape, the gravity of the situation may only set in after careful observation. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of a deceased or grieving body, Franco draws out a strange emptiness by portraying a stranger's relation to the event. The image below, which captures a young girl moving toward the scene of a fatal car accident, has a similar effect.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"A young girl tries to catch a glimpse of the scene of a fatal car accident."

In obscuring the identities of both police officer and child, the images place the observer in an even more distant relation: a stranger watching strangers. The violence that the images allude to plays out not on the bodies of victims, but on the bodies of bystanders who encounter the event through daily life, and thus observers access the event through its traces.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Left behind after a shooting July 21 on East 132nd Street in Manhattan."

These images are especially interesting when considered in relation to one of Franco's previous projects. From 1979 to 1984, Franco worked with the officers of the 46th Precinct in the Bronx, where, at the time, "a murder occurred every five days on average" (Lens). These images often show victims and perpetrators, and their grittier aesthetic reflects a different relation between bystander and crime.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"An officer holding a gun to a man who had been stopped in his car."

While this image, like Franco's more recent work, withholds eye-to-eye engagement, it is frighteningly intimate. With the officer and suspect dominating the frame, there is little outside space with which to contextualize the violence of the officer's gesture. The image also suggests that this violence is strangely routine; the officer's posture hints at disengagement, as he appears to be using the gun as a management tool to keep the suspect under control while he or someone else investigates.

Image: Ángel Franco, via Lens

"Officers carrying a boy who was caught in a gun fight while riding his bike. Shot in the chest, he survived."

These images could be useful for teaching students about both image analysis and rhetorical situation. You might ask, how are the arguments that the earlier images make specific to a 1970s/1980s crime-ridden neighborhood? How might we explain the visual changes in the later photographs? How can this shift be read as an argument about our changing relationship to violence? In seeing the way this artist's work has changed, students may be able to better grasp the importance of context in argument.

Innocence and Exploitation: Kids with Cameras

Andi — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:46:47 +0000

Image credit: screen shot of The New Orleans Kids with Camera Project

Image credit: screen shot of website for Born into Brothels

Violence in Images

Andi — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:08:09 +0000

Image credit: screen shot of Harlan County, USA

Over the past few weeks my students have been discussing several documentary films and a recurrent topic has been the line between an emotional appeal and an exploitative image of the body in pain. We have considered key scenes in the documentary Harlan County, USA (1976) in which director Barbara Kopple closely trains her camera on a man struggling to breathe through the pain of black lung. We will also discuss the inclusion of several open-casket shots of a child’s dead body in Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984). The ethics of documentarians is a topic I’ve considered before on this site, but this week my student’s surprised me by probing the distinction between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain.

Now I wish I had anticipated this turn in the discussion—had I been prepared I might have thought to bring in clips from several documentary filmmakers and images from several photographers. Re-enactment scenes from historical documentaries, images of torture of popular films such as Saw and violent clips from video games like Grand Theft Auto, along with Cindy Sherman’s film stills series might have helped us consider the many ways image-makers have troubled the line between representation and reality.

Image credit: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #14

In his article, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere,” Mark Seltzer contends with the condition of postmodernity and although he does not explicitly address photography I think some of his work might have been applicable to our discussion. Seltzer posits a postmodern “wound culture” in which there has been a breakdown in distinctions between external/internal, public/private, self/other. This breakdown occurs because the “virtual and figurative look just like and hurt just as much as, the literal and the real: perception and representation change places” (Seltzer, 24). For Seltzer is the site of the wound that collapses the boundary between real and representation by splaying the private body before public eyes. At the same time, the wound fascinates us because, despite the trauma of this collapse, it seems to maintain such a clear distinction between what is real and what is not. What can be more real than the wound? It is hard to argue with blood and guts.

Selzter’s analysis of the would as the site of all this blurring of boundaries can be extended to the photograph: a private moment captured and circulated for the public eye, an image that is both of reality and a representation of reality. Several of the distinctions Seltzer notes —between external/internal, public/private, self/other—are broken down within photographs. The shots of miners struggling to breath and the open-casket images prompt questions about the use of violent images or images of violence. Is there really a difference between images of an actual body in pain and simulated images of a body in pain? Is there any connection between violent images and violence in the world? Is the act of taking a photograph always violent? Seltzer seems to suggest that in a “wound culture” it is impossible to imagine any experience not marked by violence. It seems worth asking whether we can imagine a photographic experience that is not violent?

Rephotography Take Two

Andi — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:31:18 +0000

Image credit: Bill Ganzell

A few weeks ago I posted about rephotography projects—after thinking through some of the issues surrounding these images I began wondering why so many of these rephotographic projects appeared in the 1980s. Two texts in particular caught my attention: Bill Ganzell's 1984 Dust Bowl Descent, and Michael Williamson and Dale Maharidge's 1989 And Their Children After Them. Ganzell rephotographed several of the same images captured by documentary photographers during the Great Depression while Williamson and Maharidge retraced the steps of Walker Evans and James Agee for their 1936 photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Taken decades after the initial Depression Era images, these rephotography projects of the 1980s are a record of change.

I suppose it is not surprising that the rephotographers of the 1980s took up their cameras just as it became clear that the earlier historical moment of the New Deal had disintegrated. The decades between the ‘thirties and the ‘eighties saw a gradual decline in the influence of unions, the crumbling of the liberal-Left coalition, and a turn towards conservative politics and policy that favored the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The decline of this "New Deal Order" is linked, according to Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order with the ascendancy of the Reagan administration.

Image credit: Arthur Rothstein

Image credit: Bill Ganzell
Ganzel tracked down and rephotographed several of the same subjects and shots of earlier FSA photographs. He animates several of the earlier FSA images, solving problems suggested in the photograph. The power, for instance, of Arthur Rothstein's photograph "Fleeing a Dust Storm" comes from the viewer experiencing these subjects frozen in an uncertain moment where survival seems less than inevitable. James Curtis in Mind's Eye Mind's Truth (and more recently, Errol Morris) points out that Rothstein manipulated the circumstances of this situation in order to capture a more dramatic event. When Rothstein took this image there was no rising dust storm to flee and he staged his subjects in front of a dilapidated storage shed rather than the home where they actually lived because the smaller, more rickety structure increased the seeming precariousness of the situation. Darrel Coble, the youngest child falling behind his father and brother in Rothstein's 1936 photograph, is rephotographed by Ganzel smiling and sitting safely in his home, a copy of the FSA picture framed behind him on the wall. Ganzel seems to find a way to visually alleviate the tension within the first image and, perhaps, alters the rhetorical and political impact of the earlier photograph through the rephotograph.

Image credit: page from And Their Children After Them

Michael Williamson, Dale Maharidge, Walker Evans

Williamson and Maharidge construct Children After Them with exactly the same format as Famous Men. In their layout of the images—the original above the rephotograph both on one page—Maharidge and Williamson convey a sense of the passing of time. The photograph and rephotograph of Maggie Louise Gudger shows the same woman standing before a wooden structure at two points in her life almost fifty years apart. Although this reimaging suggests that Maggie Louise is still a victim of poverty and in need of aid, this second photograph evokes a kind of stasis. It is as though she has been silently standing there all this time. Maggie Louise stares hauntingly back at the viewer with a similar expression to that in the earlier image of her as a child. The implication is that this woman is still living an uncertain life of fear and poverty. Maggie Louise certainly had her own motivations for posing for this photograph, however, Williamson's decision to portray her exactly as Evans had in the 1930s robs her of the opportunity to convey any of that agency. She simply seems trapped, stuck in the same place and socio-economic situation as fifty years earlier.

I am curious as to how we should read these rephotographs—are they jeremiads calling the audience to reinvest in the effort to end poverty or evidence of the ultimate success of New Deal reform efforts? Ganzell’s visual solutions and Williamson and Maharidge’s records of unchanging poverty suggest that the social action urged in the original image is no longer needed or was completely ineffectual. Originally intended as rhetorical tools aimed at rationalizing the reform and relief efforts of the New Deal, the FSA photographs are reduced to talismans of a distant past in these reimages. That past is present in these images from the 1980s, suggesting that it cannot and should not be forgotten. At the same time, these rephotographs remove the uncertainty in these images of the past by showing us their future.

Struggling with the Ethics of Image-making: Sontag, Arbus, Snapshots, and Portraits

Andi — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:21:00 +0000

Image credit: Diane Arbus

As part of the final project for our “Rhetoric of Social Documentary” class my students will be completing a brief documentary film on a local issue and so we spent this week talking about the ethics of documentary filmmaking and the discomfort many people feel in having their picture taken. We began the class with a discussion of Susan Sontag’s chapter “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly” from On Photography in which she considers the work of Diane Arbus and the shift in photography away from lyrical subjects toward material that is “plain, tawdry, or even vapid” (Sontag, 28). Sontag explores the artist’s decision to focuses on people she terms “victims” or “freaks” and argues that Arbus attempts to suggest a world in which we are all isolated and awkward.

One of my students seized on Sontag’s argument about Arbus’ awkward depictions of her subject and suggested that feeling awkward while having a portrait made is common to all of us but that looking awkward in a portrait is seldom the goal of the sitter. This comment led us to consider whether Arbus might be exploiting her subjects or, at the very least, seeking their least flattering image amongst many shots in a series. As a class, we discussed the photograph of the child above with respect to the issue of consent from the people we photograph. The question of consent, however, brought us to question what it might mean to depict our subjects in a manner at odds from their own desired self-presentation—we looked at the contact sheet that shows the many portraits from which Arbus might have chosen and compared these to the one she did select.

Image credit: Diane Arbus

The relationship between the intentions of the person photographed and the photographer is a sticky one for documentary filmmakers and my students grappled with how to balance the ethics of taking someone’s picture (or mercilessly editing someone’s interview—we looked at some Michael Moore footage) with the goal of making an argument about a social issue. Sontag reminds us that the camera can function as “a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed”—a claim that my students really struggled with in our discussion of ethical image-making.

Posing for a photographic portrait is always uncomfortable. Barthes notes the anxiety that accompanies this experience and argues that in the act of posing, before the photograph is even taken, "subjects transform [themselves] in advance into an image" (Camera Lucida, 10). As a class, we considered the differences between posed portraits and snapshots and the possibilities for accounting for the goals and preferences of our subjects. Arbus’ snapshot portraits seem as uncomfortable as her static posed compositions. There seems no guarantee that the photographic genre will protect the wishes of those photographed. In fact, in many cases of social documentary the larger argument is in direct conflict with the desired self-representation of the subjects. Tricky territory here for my students and I am looking forward to watching them craft their larger rhetorical claims while keeping in mind the ethics of image-making.

Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan

noelradley — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:28:16 +0000

Image Credit: Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty

H/T Seeing and Writing 3

For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above. Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present. I have a heart for this image. The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992). Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo: "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."

View Larger Map

The search results in the map above, which I think shows some potential uses for Googlemaps streetview function as a way for students to connect to documentary photography. Does this help us locate the documentary photo? Does it give a greater sense of the place's materiality? Does this complicate or compound Sternfeld's original message about urban decay and social injustice? In what ways is the place the same, and how it is different?

"Migrant Mother" Again and Again

Andi — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:04:55 +0000

Image credit: Food for the Poor, Inc.: www.foodforthepoor.org

H/T: Nhi Lieu

This week my students and I were working our way through our lesson on visual rhetoric that ends with my students working collaboratively to analyze Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” using many of the tools that our previous classes and readings have provided. Rather than supply my students with the context surrounding this image, I thought I’d see what shared cultural knowledge we had as a group and so asked them to jot down what they know already about the iconic photograph. In No Caption Needed (a book and a blog), Michael Hariman and John Louis Lucaites argue that iconic photographs circulate broadly as a vital part of public discourse in a liberal democratic society. Not surprisingly, my students were able to draw on their collective knowledge to identify most of the contextual framing I would have been able to provide in my brief introduction to the image.

Our brief exercise in identifying context, however, brought one of my students to question whether we even needed to know the specific cultural context surrounding the original image to be able to identify the pathetic appeal. My students considered the emotional appeal within the image divorced from context. They also questioned how much context one needed to know to respond to the photograph; one student arguing that the work of the image in the current moment is to simply stand in as an icon for the Great Depression.

These questions and comments connected directly to those posed by Lucaites and Hariman who consider the many instances in which the original photograph of the “icon of poverty” has been excised from its original context and altered or reproduced for contemporary purposes—as when, for instance, a recent commercial for Allstate includes the photograph and connects the economic troubles of the recent downturn to those in the ‘thirties in an attempt to sell car insurance. Within this same class, we also considered a mailer distributed by Food for the Poor, Inc. that solicits empathy and donations by drawing explicit links between the images taken by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and more recent images of poverty that visually echo the earlier photographs. These two examples of reproduction and rephotography provided our class an excellent opportunity for discussing the relationship between context and pathos in social documentary photography.

Image credit: Food for the Poor, Inc.: www.foodforthepoor.org

Interview with Photographer Maureen R. Drennan

noelradley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:10:27 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

On the Viz. blog September 2009, I discussed Maureen R. Drennan’s photo series "Thin Ice," where Drennan proposes the potential losses to ice fishing with global warming. I recently had an interview with Drennan about "Thin Ice" and being a finalist on the New York Times DotEarth blog/Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition. We discussed remote places, the scale of her project, the themes and the arguments of the photos, as well as the intersections of photography and story.

“A small story about a greater problem”: Interview with Maureen R. Drennan

Viz.: I was talking to a colleague about your series of photos. She said that when she thinks about visual rhetoric and the environment, she thinks of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She was struck by the contrast between “An Inconvenient Truth” as a visual rhetoric piece and what your series of photos are doing.

Drennan: With Al Gore’s movie, he was really trying to hammer home this situation that is imminent, and I think he’s trying to reach as many people as possible. I think it was done very successfully. It was done in a way where a lot of people could understand it. It was accessible, and it was also dynamic and intense. I know my work is not like that. I wouldn’t know how to go about doing that. That would be for a different photographer…I’m not a scientist. I don’t claim to be an expert.

Viz.: How do you think your photos compare to the other visualizations of climate change?

Drennan: I hope this doesn’t come across as self-deprecating. I think [my images] were a little more subtle. It’s not super dynamic, but I think that’s okay. It’s a small story that I think can relate to the big picture. We’re all involved in small stories. It’s what we’re involved in every day. It makes up the big picture. I think other visualizations of climate change are grand and monumental. My pictures aren’t like that. They’re a lot more quiet.

Viz.: Can you describe how you began to take these pictures of ice fishing?

Drennan: I’m from Manhattan, born and raised here in New York. I’m really drawn to remote, beautiful places because it’s so different from what I’m accustomed to. My husband Paul is from Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which is a very small town in northern Wisconsin. When we would go visit his in-laws, I usually wander around and take pictures of the area. I was just really drawn to these beautiful, remote lakes, and the fact that there are these little shacks on the lake. [For people who aren’t from a cold climate, ice-fishing] is sort of a foreign thing. I was really drawn to it…What are they doing out there? Why are there these little houses out there on the lake? I just instinctually wandered out there and started chatting with people and taking their picture and taking photographs of the landscape and the ice shacks.

What was initially so interesting was the community and how tight knit they are: these temporary communities out on the ice. They only last a few months, and people bond. They become so close. It’s like having a cabin in the summer at the lake. It’s a little place—a little refuge that you go to—and you’re friends with the neighbors. You also (for safety reasons) have to be looking out for one another. Even though it’s an isolated activity, there’s also a community aspect.

Viz.: How did your photos become part of the Artist as Citizen project?

Drennan: Even just in the two years that I have been doing this, the season got a little bit shorter. The ice shacks went out later in the winter and came back earlier. It’s way below zero—like 10 degrees below zero and 20 degrees below when the wind picks up—so I spend a lot of time in the shacks talking to people. In talking to people this past winter, people [would say] how the season is changing and the ice is changing…That’s anecdotal. I don’t think [the ice fishers are] studying charts and graphs, but it was interesting to hear. It just got me thinking about these lovely communities and how this is a small story about a greater problem.

For the full interview, click here.

Documentary Photography and the Caption

Andi — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 20:27:45 +0000

Image Credit: Rolex Dela Pena, European Press Photo Agency

H/T: Lens, The New York Times

While scrolling through the Lens photojournalism blog this morning I came across this photograph of a the hand of a dead body partially obscured by caution tape. The photographed victim was one of over forty people killed in violence following the election on Monday in the Philippines--many of the people kidnapped and killed were lawyers, journalists, and relatives of a local politician. What struck me most about this image was its relationship to text; both within the photograph and beneath it in the caption. Across the image the photographer has captured the text of the caution tape "Police Line Do Not Cross." It seems, however, that the photographer and the viewer disregard this warning by visually transgressing past the barrier and the victim's hand disregards this warning by physically transgressing beyond the tape. It is the textual warning on the tape that contributes to a sense of action within the image--agency on the part of the victim and the intrusion on the part of the viewer/photographer.

This possibility of action dissipates when we consider the text beneath the photograph. The caption reads, "A dead body was covered in banana leaves along a hillside in Ampatuan, Maguidanao Province in the southern Philippines. The Philippines declared emergency rule and dispatched additional security forces to a southern province as the death toll in the country's worst election-related violence reached 46." Susan Sontag has argued that the caption is an attempt to fix the meaning of the image and that "only that which narrates can make us understand" (Sontag, On Photography). This caption certainly does fix the significance of the photograph--there is no agency left for this victim. The passive construction of the description, the lack of any attempt to identify the dead body strip the victim of any ability to signify on his or her own. Moreover, the quick jump to the ongoing violence fixes the significance within a national context.

Of course, this type of captioning both within and beneath the photograph is prevalent (and probably necessary) in all documentary photojournalism. Miles Orvell has considered the horrific subject matter focused on by documentary photographs as a visual tactic aimed to help us “overcome our habituation to shocking images…to make us feel the burden of our own responsibility" (Orvell, American Photography). Certainly this documentary image of the violence in the Philippines, like all documentary images, draw the viewer’s attention to a social issue with the intention of inspiring change. However, there seems little guarantee that the photographs of bodies in pain or of people in need will be little more than invitations to voyeurism. This image highlights this problem with documentary photography more intensely through the inclusion of the outstretched hand—the reaching hand suggests in some way that this subject is calling out for aid. There is, however, no assurance that looking at a documentary photograph will motivate that viewer towards political or social action. Enter the caption as the attempt to cajole that viewer into action.

The relationship between a documentary photograph, the caption, and the call to action was of particular importance to documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Linda Gordon argues that much of Lange’s FSA photography was explicitly political and aimed at creating specific changes in agricultural policy. The difficulty of communicating an immediate social reality drove Lange to write extensive captions for her documentary images because she “wanted to fix the meanings of photographs” (Gordon, “The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist” The Journal of American History December 2006, 717-718). The images of Lange and other FSA photographers did help to galvanize public support for the federal relief programs of the New Deal. However, simply because these images contributed to broader social change does not mean that they always did or always will communicate a social and political message. There is no guarantee that the documentary image will be interpreted as a call to political and social action no matter how extensive the caption.

Several in Eight Million

Andi — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:49:50 +0000

Screen shot of New York Times

H/T: Becky

I recently spent a large chunk of time browsing through the collection of profiles in sound and images, "One in 8 Million" on the New York Times website. I went there in search of examples of narrated slide shows for my students who are creating their own this month for our class on social documentary. The series focuses on the "passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions" of New York City's "parade of people" it labels "characters" (Series Intro). The series certainly does treat its individual subjects as quirky characters worthy of being paraded and I found myself endlessly trolling through profile after profile until it seemed the subjects were all the same in their uniqueness. "One in 8 Million" allows viewers into the lives of the "Ex-Bank Robber" or the "Blind Wine Taster" and suggests that each is fascinating for its quirkiness but the ubiquity of that quirky quality acts as the great equalizer here.

Rather than close-reading one of these profiles (it was too hard to chose just one!), I began thinking about how this project functions as a collection. The interactive component of the project allows the viewer to scroll through the collected narratives, see one photograph, and hear one snippet of narration from each profile. The collection comprised of black and white photographs recalls the "Family of Man" exhibit and yet the language used to describe the project ("parade" of "characters") and the labels by which each profile is introduced ("the Sneaker Connoisseur" or "the Urban Taxidermist") seems evocative of Arbus' focus on people she depicted as social others. Despite its awkward descriptive labels and language, this project invokes an inclusiveness in its attempt to collect a broad range of individuals.

Moreover, the collection implies a kind of comprehensiveness by which each profile serves a representative function. We might not all know an obsessive shoe collector, but surely we know someone similar. Browsing this collection left me wondering about the current popularity of projects such as "One in 8 Million" or the StoryCorps project. Literary critic Susan Stewart argues "the collection presents a hermetic world. The have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world--a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority" (Stewart, On Longing). Are these collections an attempt to appeal to a broad range of people because they represent a broad range of people? Are these collections attempts to claim an authoritative depiction by deploying a rhetoric of objectivity through sheer exhaustiveness? Why do we want to see one in eight million?

Plastics Pollution and the Death of Albatrosses

noelradley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:45:36 +0000

Image Credit: Chris Jordan with MidwayJourney

H/T Enviro Smith (Enviroart on Twitter)

This video was filmed as part of a project called MidwayJourney, which is documenting the ecological problems of Midway Atoll in the North Pacific. Five artists, headed by multi-media artist Chris Jordan, have stationed themselves on this string of three islands to document the death of albatrosses, who mistake plastic for food and become filled with the plastic waste. The birds eventually die of starvation. Photographed by Jordan and his colleagues, the decaying bodies of the albatrosses dramatically reveal the culprit of this environmental disaster: the collection of plastics with a macabre combination of feather, weathering flesh, beak, and delicate bone.

Image Credit: Chris Jordan

H/T Enviro Smith (Enviroart on Twitter)

The portrayal of plastic is not the first by Jordan. His collections often use manipulated digital photographs to portray the scale of plastic and other commercial and industrial waste products. From Jordan's 2009 project "Running the Numbers II," the two zoomed details (below) help represent the 2.4 million pieces of plastic that enter the earth's waters every day. In this digitally-born pointillism or collage, Jordan uses images of bits and pieces of plastic to create a much larger composite picture of a wave, entitled Gyre 2009 (an 8-by-11 foot image in 3 panels), which you can view on Jordan's site. The iconic beauty of the composite image belies the reality that the elements of the image indicate: the penetration of plastics into the world's oceans. It is the scale of the disaster that Jordan indicates, as well as the pernicious effects of our inability (or unwillingness) to see the underlying causes.

Zoomed Image of Gyre, 2009 by Chris Jordan

H/T DotEarth

In this new project, Jordan has ventured from digital manipulation, however, to new formats. As the captions of the photographs explain, none of the plastic has been manipulated or moved. Depicting the birds with documentary photography and video, as well as writing on their blog, the artists are trying to show the reality of this particular kind of pollution risk in a less-mediated fashion. The affective basis of the video and photographs also seem a departure from the more ironic and conceptual basis of the earlier 2009 series.

Partial Zoomed Image of Gyre, 2009 by Chris Jordan

H/T DotEarth

Indeed, Jordan writes on the mission statement of the MidwayJourney project, "Maybe it is not too ambitious to hope—if we can fully rise to the occasion—that we might be able to co-create a multi-media work of art that tenderly witnesses this middle point that humanity finds itself at right now. And in the eye of the storm—the apex of the Gyre—perhaps our collaborative efforts can create a container forhealing that might have some small effect on the collective choice that is to come."

Visualizing 'Green'

noelradley — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:18:25 +0000

Image credit: From Maureen R. Drennan
H/T to Artist as Citizen Burning Embers Competition

This series of photos by Maureen Drennan resonates with the way I have been thinking about environmental activism. The photographs tell a story of ice-fishing communities in Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota and depict ordinary ice-fishers: bright-eyed children over plastic gallon fishing buckets, seasoned fishers in pullovers and camouflage, and bright cabins in contrast to the winter white. There are also pictures of cracks in the ice.

As the photographer writes, ice fishing is decreasing with global warning, which impacts sub-cultures of fishers, losses of community as well as economic losses.

Recently, I have been thinking we need incisive, creative visualizations of ecological crisis. Mainstream ‘green’ imagery seems (to me, lately) way too benign. Do swirling, interconnected arrows really cause people to recycle? Do they have a limited function? Are muted greens and browns the right palate for motivating owners of industrial companies across the world, who need to decrease polluting?

On DotEarth, the New York Times environmental blogger Andrew C. Revkin is promoting ideas that relate to mine. This month Revkin features the work of four designers, Drennan’s photos and three other visualizations about ecological crisis from the Art as Citizen/DotEarth project Burning Embers Competition. Revkin not only featured the artist/designers, for he also inspired the project with a proposal for illustrations about climate risk in an earlier post. It is interesting that Revkin's proposal was answered, and it is also interesting the kinds of images created.

Drennan’s photos were quite different from a chart, or a visualization based on numerical data. She measures climate risk against some other kind of scale. Her images of people in their threatened environment point out the interpersonal connections and practices that will be lost with global warming. Is this a more effective picture? What are the audience for Drennan’s as opposed to the other images? Look for an interview with Drennan on Viz. in the coming weeks.

Fallen Soldiers

timturner — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:52:02 +0000

At his first televised press conference last week, President Obama received a question about a controversy that, though once debated quite energetically, had seemed for a time to recede into the background as the casualty rate for U.S. soldiers has fallen. The questioner wanted to know whether the new administration would order the Pentagon to reverse its policy of forbidding the publication of photographs showing the return of fallen soldiers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (President Obama responded by not commenting, since the policy is currently "under review.")Image credit: thememoryhole.org, via Associated Press, NYT, 2/15/2009

The question, and the issue, were covered yesterday by The New York Times in a story and an editorial urging the President to overturn the policy. As the author of the former summarizes the issue, "Part of the debate that has developed turns on whether the return of soldiers is a private or public matter. While families have registered a range of opinions about allowing the news media at Dover, many have maintained that the return of a body is so deeply personal that they should be able to decide whether to keep it private." Above and beyond the questions raised by the difficult question of how to treat the images of what is essentially both a public and a private sacrifice (a soldier dying for his or her country is also lost to his or her family), the debate itself is simply a reminder of the power of images to move arguments.

Nina Berman Documents Iraq Wounded

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:18:36 +0000

I recently discovered the photography of Nina Berman and have been completely bowled over by it. Her photos of soldiers wounded in Iraq are some of the most emotionally wrenching I've seen, masterful examples of the emotional impact photos can have, regardless of what you think of the current war. I have a feeling that her images will be long remembered for how powerfully they document the wounded (as opposed to deceased) casaulties of the war in Iraq. The series "purple hearts" and "marine wedding" are especially powerful. It is difficult to use anything other than superlative terms when describing this fine photographer's work. These are excellent examples for students of the pathos that individual photos can convey. I don't feel the photos themselves make an explicit argument, but they could be employed in one easily enough. Out of respect for a working professional's copyright, I will not post any of the actual photos here but encourage readers to use the hotlinks above to visit her wonderful site.