viz.

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.

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 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. 

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. 

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.

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."

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.

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. 

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.

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.