viz. - nostalgia

Photographs of the Willard Suitcases

Calliope — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:59:12 +0000

Beaten up, bulging, and with one latch ajar, this old suitcase beckons to be opened. It was closed for a long time, deposited with its owner in 1953 at the Willard Asylum for the Insane near Seneca Lake, NY. This and around 400 other suitcases that belonged to the asylum's patients sat for many years, forgotten in the attic of the defunct facility until discovered in the mid-1990s. After being exhibited publically for the first time in 2004, many of the suitcases are now temporarily in the care of Jon Crispin who has undertaken to photograph the collection. The images in this post are from Crispin's blog which chronicles his experience inspecting and documenting the personal effects of the Willard patients.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

On his blog, Crispin visually "unpacks" the suitcases for viewers, first presenting their tough-looking exteriors, then their inner compartments and finally, through close ups, individual items themselves. This photographic unveiling seems intended to simulate the experience of first discovering and opening the parcels (some of which date back to the 1920s). The open-face pictures have a luminous quality that evokes the revelatory experience of opening a present, or hoisting up the lid of an old costume box. Like beautiful clamshells, the suitcases cradle their contents in a visually striking way. Most are lined with fabric or pretty yellowed paper which gives the objects strewn inside them a personal, familiar, and strangely cheerful feel.

The paraphernalia radiate cheeriness in spite of, or almost in defiance of, the fate of institutional confinement that lurks behind each photograph. There are plenty of generic items in the cases, like hair combs and safety pins, but also stuff that has a very personal logic to it: biographically significant items that suggest the suitcase owners led full and interesting lives, at least before they were "put away." The case at the top of the page for instance belonged to a Ukrainian emigree who we know made a model of a church from his native country and gave it to President Truman. (The model was apparently impressive enough to find a home in a government building in Washington). The patient was also a prodigious painter while at Willard, which makes his collection of postcards, photos, prints and souvenirs of special interest. It is interesting to think of this case as an artistic wellspring, a physical container of ideas from the outside world that, at some point, might well have found their way into the patient's creations. More fascinating still is the notion that this artist's private suitcase has become, under Crispin's artistic supervision, a still life in its own right.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

This green suitcase, or sturdy trunk rather, belonged to a World War II veteran named Frank who was living in Brooklyn in 1945 when the police committed him to the psych wards for publically protesting a social slight. Even before I read about his tragic story, Frank's suitcase stood out to me because his possessions somehow make him seem knowable, even present. The miniature note books, the shipping tags, the posed photographs, and scraps brought back from serving overseas all suggest that he liked to thoughtfully record and remember experiences.

Frank's nostalgia, his comfortable air behind the camera, his propensity for self-portraiture and interest in memorabilia make him feel almost like a peer of ours, say, a person who would feel right at home using Instagram. But there's something eery about how close he feels to us. It's almost as if Frank, or whoever packed his suitcase, knew that it would become a time capsule of sorts, the only means through which future generations would get to know the handsome, dignified man in the photographs. I wish I could thank him for leaving us such a beautiful object-memoir of his life.

Image Credit: Jon Crispin

Some Enchanted Image

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:23:56 +0000

Right now in my class we’re preparing to turn in the first draft of the second paper assignment, which is a comparative rhetorical analysis between two productions of the same musical where I’d like my students to talk about the different rhetorical arguments made by each production using sets, costumes, and performance, as well as changed scripts. In order to alleviate student concerns, I’ve set myself the task to write a sample paper for them. It’s been an interesting experience for me, and a somewhat difficult one. For my texts, I’ve chose to compare the original 1949 Broadway production of South Pacific with the 2008 revival.

Image Credit: CastRecordings.com

What I wanted the students to really do in this assignment is to analyze the visual rhetoric of each production and compare their different strategies each uses to make their argument to their audience. One of the striking issues with the 2008 production is that it was designed to look visually similar to the original 1949 production. Clive Barnes noted that the actress who plays the play’s heroine Nellie Forbush gives “an uncannily precise re-creation of [Mary Martin, the actress who originated the role on Broadway]’s ‘Honey Bun’” in his review. You can see below how the costume O’Hara wears for that number in 2008 deliberately invokes the original worn by Mary Martin:

Image Credit: Playbill.com

This may be in part because this is the first official Broadway revival of the piece, and so is thus more bound to the visual heritage of this popular musical, but I’m also interested in how maybe this intertextual visual creates a rhetoric of nostalgia. Ben Brantley’s review for the Times describes the production “as if a vintage photograph had been restored not with fuzzy, hand-colored prettiness but with you-are-there clarity.” There’s an interesting argument going on here: South Pacific thus allows us to access a pure American past without mediation, while being itself part of a highly mediated genre. Nostalgia thus isn’t about accessing something lost or absent, but is rather a real history that we can actual replay over and over again. (Look again at the Cast Recording cover at the top here, too: the visual is strangely faded and impressionistic, and in particularly interesting place. How does this visual rhetoric work against what Brantley observes?)

While I quite like this argument (which follows my recent fascination with Colonial Williamsburg as “history come to life”), my concern at this point is whether or not I can expect my students to do this sort of subtle distinguishing, or if I should just warn them that the more different the presentations, the easier it will be for them to discuss the differences. Hopefully my paper-production can serve as inspiration for theirs.

Arab Image Foundation

micklethwait — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:34:44 +0000

The progressive deconstruction of Orientalism is catching up with information technology. Since 1996, the Arab Image Foundation, based in Lebanon, has been amassing a digital collection of photographs from the Arab world.

What's refreshing about this collection is that it leaps beyond the topic of the Western gaze (popularly studied by such likes as Malek Alloula in The Colonial Harem) to offer up thousands of unfiltered photographic self-representations from the modern Arab world. In short, this collection stands as a visual counter-argument to the tradition of harem girl postcards and romanticized portraiture that emphasize the "biblical" antiquity of the peoples of the Middle East.

Their website has two features: a publicity section and an image search that requires free registration. Registration allows you to create your own portfolio of images found through keyword searches, photographers' names, studios, collections, genre, technique, etc. Sadly, there is no dynamic browsing feature as you might find on image sites like Flickr.com or Ffffound.com, so it's not a friendly place for the cyber-flaneur. Best to know what you're looking for before you visit.