viz. - Documentary

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

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

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

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

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

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

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

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.

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.

Steve Davis and the Unspectacular Death of American Falls

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:36:30 +0000

Steve Davis, via Lens

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

While Welcome to Pine Point takes the audience on a journey filled with intimate, almost voyeuristic moments and the associative links that make up personal recollection, As American Falls feels more distant, if no less poignant. The composition of the above two images contributes to this distance; the viewer is far away from the houses, at a strange angle, as if lying in the mud; the second diffuses the viewer's focus, with a few scattered elements unified by a beautiful but slightly ominous sky.

There is distance in this image too; the subjects' faces aren't discernible, and it is difficult to tell what is actually going on. While this is presumably some kind of homecoming parade (what looks like a costumed mascot is visible on the far right of the photo), the information we need to be certain of that has been removed. The image is like a confusing childhood memory--there were cheerleaders, so-and-so was there, but what were we doing? When was this? Our access is highly limited.

What I really like about Davis' project is the way this lack of access can produce a strange, confusing longing in the viewer. The mood seems appropriate to this kind of loss, which is, as Davis points out, slow and unspectacular. What there is to know about the town is slowly slipping away, and what is left are paused moments, simultaneously vivid (particularly in the first two photos) and incomplete. In a way, the images construct the decline of a town as the gradual loss of personal memories of the town, thereby making the town's decline legible to anyone who has moved away from where he or she grew up or has just grown older, losing bits and pieces of a previously robust sense of place.

Experiencing a Long-Lost Town

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

The project is constructed as sort of an enhanced scrapbook. The artists combine grainy video, including shots from a memorial video that was offered to residents before the town was destroyed, and old and new photos of Pine Point and its residents with text that reflects on the experience of rediscovering the town. The fragmentary nature of the documents and the scrapbook feel give the project a certain intimacy, as if the reader/viewer/user is discovering these traces of Pine Point herself. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the project draws on the nostalgia most of us feel for places we experienced as children. For viewers who remember the eighties, the poor video and photo quality (as well as the wardrobe choices the images document) will likely draw on that nostalgia as well.

The collection of different media into a digital format raises questions about how we remember, and the project at times seems to invoke these questions. The initial load screen features an illustration of a VHS tape rewinding, thereby replicating a regressive process that most of us haven't seen in a while and thereby drawing attention to how technology affects the process of remembering. A later load screen, which features the word "Town" and a progress bar, draws attention to Pine Point's fully digital existence. Wiped off the map, it exists primarily in its memorial website and in this project. While the disappearing town is by no means a new phenomenon, the project does raise questions about what will become of towns that are currently in decline and how they might best be remembered.

The African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists

noelradley — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:16:27 +0000

"Revolutionary" By Wadsworth Jarrell Via Howard University

What does 1960s black nationalist art say to us today? TVLand's recent documentary on the Chicago-based Afri-COBRA movement suggests a few major takeaways. One is that images created for a community--by a community--inspire revolution. But I'd like to draw out a second theme voiced by former Afri-COBRA members who argue in a variety of ways that change starts with mind, and not the body.

"Wall of Respect" 1967 Via University of Chicago

The mural Wall of Respect was the beginning of Afri-COBRA activitism. The collaboration was meant to promote African-American heroes and artists while avoiding the physical clash that characterized racial rioting in 1960s Chicago. This begins the film's organization of artistic form (mind) apart from public protest (body). Artists created the positive imagery to change minds and insisted they were transforming their own minds. "We were confrontational in the sense that we were confronting ourselves and our people. We weren't confronting anybody else," said Afri-COBRA artist Napolean Jones Henderson. "We were challenging ourselves to see ourselves as we are."

The film continues a visual divide between politics and aesthetics. Historical marches, speeches, and sit-ins from 1950s America (in grainy black-and-white) appear less vibrant, if only in a visual sense. Against footage from the civil rights movement, Afri-COBRA paintings glow with rich "cool aid" colors and celebratory imagery. Afri-COBRA was a continuation and not a critique of civil rights, but the sets of images do register distinctly: domestic American civic imagery versus Africanist imagery, 1950s versus 1960s, documentary film versus imaginative new iconographies, African-Americans struggling to be seen at all versus African-Americans proactively setting out how they will be seen, often with non-Western forms or motifs.

Screenshot of JET Cover Via Googlebooks

Afri-COBRA art often plays up its own rejection of literal revolution, such as the bullet motif. The 1971 JET cover features one of Jet Jarrell's fashion pieces, a bullet belt. (The mixed media painting "Revolutionary" incorporates real bullets.) In the Jet cover, the model wears the bullets and uses a butcher knife, menancing signals that she has the means defend herself physically. But that's only the first step in the representation here. The idealized 1960s domestic setting, the assured posture of the female figure and her knowing stare communicate that force won't be necessary. Change is inevitable, it says to JET readers, and is happening from within. You don't have to believe in the mind/body split to buy Afri-COBRA project, for the art movement was never truly disembodied. The rhetoric of mind, rather, was about Afri-COBRA members creating life on their terms, avoiding socially proscribed behaviors and ways-of-seeing.

Staging the Past: Irina Werning's "Back to the Future"

Megan Eatman — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Nico in 1990 and 2010, France; Irina Werning

This week, I want to draw attention to Irene Werning's Back to the Future project (website probably not safe for work; there is a small amount of nudity), in which the artist meticulously reconstructs images from her subjects' pasts. The results are always impressive, often funny, and sometimes touching in their illustration of how much and how little changes with the passage of time.

Lali in 1978 and 2010, Buenos Aires

In most cases, the images are recreated more or less exactly. Subjects wear identical clothing and mimic their earlier facial expressions. The small differences in the images then become especialy interesting. In the image above, Lali's outfit is noticeably different (a solid dress, heeled shoes) and the building she poses in has been updated. While the building's changes were outside of the photographer's control, I wonder about the wardrobe differences. While the shoes show the shift to adulthood, I am not sure what to make of the brown dress. There are smaller wardrobe differences in other images; perhaps they draw attention to the image as performance, creating a deliberate gap in the illusion that reminds viewers of the gap between the past and present.

Marita and Coty in 1977 and 2010, Buenos Aires

The images are often hilarious. The playfulness of performing your childhood self shows in the images, particularly those like the image above in which the subject has to replicate his/her expression as a baby. The incongruity of an adult with a baby-faced wonder seems silly, even though it seems like it would be depressing because the loss of innocence is at the core of what makes the disjuncture amusing. While these images can be poignant for a variety of reasons, they also seem to deal in a light-hearted manner with the departure of the past. The replication of the past (and the often uncanny resemblance between child and adult subjects) indicates that it isn't really gone, but things are different, and sometimes in an amusing way.

Damian in 1989 and 2010, London

If you go to Werning's website to see more of these images, I would also recommend her other projects. Her website shows interesting variety, including a series of photos featuring a Chinese crested dog named Chini in different costumes and a collection of photos called "After Army" that features images from a beach frequented by young people who have just completed their tour of duty with the Israeli army.

Cosplay and the Visual Rhetoric of Loneliness

Megan Eatman — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:19:05 +0000

The Anime Within, Elena Dorfman

The image above is from a photo essay on the Mother Jones website. The essay, entitled "The Anime Within," was disappointing to me, and while I don't want to malign Dorfman's project, especially since I am glad to see cosplay getting attention in a publication that might not normally address it, I do want to critique some of the messages that these images send.

In the picture above, the subject looks uncomfortably stranded between reality and fantasy. While in costume, she wears minimal if any makeup (thereby disrupting the illusion) and is noticeably withdrawn in posture and expression. The dark background suggests that she is nowhere; not in reality, not in fantasy, and certainly not in a community. She looks both alone and lonely.

Not all of Dorfman's subjects look as depressed. The man above's expression looks faintly playful; he has an attitude that seems appropriate to his costume. He is, however, still alone.

I know that photographing the subject alone is a convention of portraiture, but this essay made me more conscious of its effects in particular contexts. Few of the subjects have truly impressive costumes, which would not in itself be problematic if it weren't also for the fact that none really appear to be having fun. The combination of these two elements, combined with the isolation imposed by the dark background, makes the subjects seem less like artists engaged in a vibrant fan culture and more like sad loners half-heartedly trying to escape reality.

In this particular context, it seemed as if the composition choices helped enforce rather than dispel existing beliefs about people in certain fan cultures. While I would not suggest that a photo essay on cosplay ignore bad costumes or sad people, a practice that already has such circumscribed representation in many contexts deserves a photo essay that complicates stereotypes and emphasizes the complex issues of play, belonging, and performance that permeate this culture.

New Media, Old-school Agriculture

fc — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:31:42 +0000

Image Credit: screen capture from CookingUpAStory.com

I sat down in front of the television this Tuesday to watch the PBS premier of Dirt! The Movie on Independent Lens. I had been looking forward to seeing this documentary about the soil cylce and its importance on agriculture, health and geopolitics, and I had even planned to write about it for this week's post. As you can see, that plan fell through: I went in expecting a dirt-y movie, but mostly what I got was a mess. While there was plenty of titular soil in Dirt!, the film came across as a random collection of dirt-related vignettes that were either purely repetitive or entirely unrelated. In all fairness, cutting the film down to fit a one-hour running time may be responsible for the disjointed presentation, but most reviews of its Sundance screening agree that it is an unnecessarily rambling documentary. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I had spent that morning talking to David Parry about the effects of internet technology and networked space on the established institutions of democracy, and as POV took over my television screen with its adapted running of Food, Inc., I began to think about documentary films-- and, in particular, films that intend to effect social and democratic change-- in the online time and space of the internet. Thinking about documentary film within a networked social space reminded me, fortuitously, of Cooking Up A Story, an internet hybrid that bills itself rather oddly as "an online television show and blog about people, food, and sustainable living." More about soil, sardines and the web-lives of food-docs (including video) after the break.

While the creators of Cooking Up A Story ("CUpS" for short) consistently refer to their site as a "television show," CUpS is much more sophisticated and interesting than television on the internet. Thanks to Hulu, most of us are by now familiar with what television looks like on the internet: it plays on demand and works with a different advertising model, but otherwise it remains remarkably faithful to its broadcast incarnation. By contrast, CUpS is a multi-format, multi-media collection of documentaries, lectures, interviews, opinion journalism and more; they offer, by their own account, "Doc Shorts," "Video Interviews," "Essays," "How-to Cooking Videos," "Family Recipes," "Video Shorts," and "News Around the Web."

Clearly, this is something other than a television show. The content and even format of CUpS have a lot in common with websites like Zester Daily, Civil Eats and even Chow, but the emphasis on micro-documentary films sets CUpS apart from those sites as well (and is, I am guessing, why they call it a "show"). Most of the other food-issue sites online follow more of a "print" model and use video primarily as supplementary material. Along with an emphasis on food, all of the videos and articles on CUpS comes pre-packaged for online networking: everything is eminently bloggable, embeddable and, in a word, share-able. As online space becomes as much about connection as it is about communication, CUpS model might have some substantial advantages over web-based mirrors of magazine and television formats.

A brief, somewhat representative sample of their video content might include 1) a conference presentation from the Senior Science Manager of the Monterey Bay Acquarium's Sustainable Seafood Initiative (the publishers of the Seafood Watch guide to sustainable seafood):

2) a continuing-ed style video from SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education funded by USDA) discussing the benefits of no-till commercial farming:

3) a short-form documentary about an organic dariy farmer:

4) and an interesting interview with Mark Bittman about his new book Food Matters:

The collection is ecclectic, but the format is of, by and for the internet and won't run into cross-media problems like the re-editing of Dirt! for television. In fact, the episodic, semi-related, often interchangeable segments of Dirt! would probably have worked better broken down and dispersed as smaller docs, and a web-friendly sharable format would almost certainly work better for community building than the "screening toolkits" posted on Dirt! The Movie's website. Rather than generating community activity and espirit d'corp from scratch, socially concerned docs ought to consider utilizing the communities people already inhabit online by generating material that is web-friendly from its inception.

Documenting a Dog Fight

Andi — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:27:21 +0000

Screen shot of narrated slide show, Shelter for the Scarred

featured on Washington Post website

Photographer: Carol Guzy

This past week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments considering the constitutionality of U.S. v. Stevens, a case that makes it a federal crime to make and sell visual images of animal cruelty. Although originally created by Congress to curb the market for "crush videos"--images of people in high heel shoes stomping on small animals for the purposes of titillating the viewer--the statute contains language so vague that it led the justices to propose a slew of bizarre hypotheticals ranging from the artistic value of images of force-feeding fowl for foie gras to the possibility of a pay-per-view human sacrifice channel. Now I have to admit that I am slightly shaky on all of the legal issues at stake here, but this transcript of the oral arguments certainly made for some interesting reading. Moreover, and not surprisingly, many of the questions raised within the oral arguments align with issues we often consider with respect to documentary studies and visual culture.

At several points within the discussion the justices probed the question of whether the presence of the camera, or the act of taking the picture encouraged the violent action documented. Or conversely, they considered whether classifying images of animal cruelty as unprotected free speech might dry up the market for the images and thus reduce the instances of violent conduct. Justice Scalia pressed Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katal to distinguish between the attempt to limit the activity (dog-fighting or crushing small animals) from the attempt to prevent communication about those acts (images of dog-fighting or images of small animals being crushed). Katal linked his argument to an earlier decision in New York v. Ferber in which the Supreme Court ruled that child pornography is not protected under the First Amendment. Justice Ginsburg suggested that Mr. Stevens was only filming the dog-fighting and that the fighting would occur whether or not he was present whereas the "simultaneous abuse of the child, it occurs only because the picture is being taken." She went on to urge Mr. Katal to confront that "the very taking of the picture is the offense. That is the abuse of the child" (Transcript, 25). This line of argument prompted several key questions about whether the images of animal cruelty were staged solely for the camera--a set of questions that is often posed about the ethical obligations of photo-journalists and documentary filmmakers.

For me, one of the most intriguing moments in the oral arguments, however, occurred when Justice Scalia chastised Lawyer Patricia Millet for engaging with the language of the statute that provides for exception in the case of educational, artistic, journalistic, or scientific depictions. Justice Scalia notes, "I really think you should focus not on the educational value for -- to make people hate bullfighting and things, but on quite the opposite, it seems to me. On the right under the First Amendment of people who like bullfighting , who like dog-fighting, who like cock-fighting, to present their side of -- of the debate" (Transcript, 45). One of the key components here is the multivalent nature of images of, say, dog-fighting. These images--as Ms. Millet pointed out--can be used by documentary filmmakers or by PETA activists as in the images above to argue against dog-fighting but--as Justice Scalia indicates--may also be used by advocates for the activity. In fact, because of the slippery nature of the caption, the very same images can be used to argue any number of interpretations. And they were in this instance--Mr. Stevens argued his images were historical and had value as documentary. The jury saw otherwise.

While the vague wording of the statute will probably lead to its being overturned, it also led to some fascinating moments in which the justices tested the legal limits of the language. In addition to the gripping discussion about whether the depiction of modern men and women dressed as gladiators fighting to the death would hold historical value, the court also considered the distinction between images of dog-fighting and staged images of dog-fighting. After mulling over these debates about the reality of the referent, the justices considered whether there was a difference, more generally, between images of violence and images of simulated acts of violence. This discussion continued until the question was raised whether images of violence lead to an increase in the number of incidents of violence within a community. And this point brought the court back to the consideration of whether regulating the image will restrict the act depicted and whether restricting the act depicted justifies restricting free speech.

There is more to be had within the transcript for scholars of visual studies and we'll hear more from the justices when their decision is released in a few weeks.

Science Art, Part Two: Biology of the Strange

emcg — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:22:57 +0000

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

In the viz. archive, Dale quotes a 1979 interview with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in which he insists that "if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs." Re-watching Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which offers a strangely beautiful vision of Antarctica, I was reminded of the late-19th-century scientific drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Both give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange.

For Haeckel, stylized drawings like the radiolaria array above would help naturalists see the unity of life (and its common descent). However, both his contemporaries and modern scientists have questioned the accuracy of these illustrations, their fidelity to the specimens he collected. Despite their problematic status as scientific illustration, these images make visible an eerie vitality that connects organic life. Their artistry invokes a feeling in the viewer akin to a science-fictional alterity: these images are both familiar and strange, hence their power to alter our vision.

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

Similarly, Herzog’s Encounters defies existing schemes of classification. Critics have pointed to its oddball poetry, its mystical vision; in particular, it’s been understood in terms of the “absurd quest” trope that dominates Herzog’s oeuvre, including his previous documentary Grizzly Man. But its quirkiness perhaps obscures its achievement: Encounters re-envisions the nature film.

Instead of “fluffy penguins,” the camera lingers on a disoriented, perhaps “deranged,” lone penguin as it follows a determined path into the interior, toward “certain death.” The underwater footage, set to majestic but slightly dissonant choral music, takes on an element of danger, even fear, when juxtaposed with researcher Sam Bowser’s science-fictional descriptions of this “horribly violent world,” with “worm-type things with horrible mandibles” that drove our ancestors to flee in terror to the land.

Image Credit: Encounters at the End of the World

The film also insists on human subjects and interventions as part of the Antarctic landscape: the camera turns with equal curiosity to the continent’s temporary human inhabitants and to the “bleak Motel 6 drabness” of McMurdo Research Base. Instead of the researcher as talking head, we see the nutritional ecologists who study the feeding patterns of Weddell seals enact a performance-art piece: they slowly crouch down to listen to the ice above the Ross Sea, accompanied by the “inorganic,” Pink-Floyd-like sounds of underwater seal recordings.

At the risk of mere gushy praise versus cool intellectual distance: I confess that I left the film with a sense of gratitude for its vision of scientific inquiry as deeply motivated by aesthetic appreciation and even mystical yearnings--from the glaciologist who dreams that he hears the cry of the iceberg B15 to the physicist who describes his investigations of the neutrino as an attempt to contact “some spirit or god” inhabiting a separate universe.

The apocalyptic resonance of the film's title points, ultimately, to the urgent need for "new images" of science. To reiterate the sentiments of last week's post, perhaps environmental activism must begin not with cliched images of cuddly, distressed polar bears trapped on ice floes, but with visions of wonder, with a sense of mysterious beauty, with the biology of the strange exemplified by Haeckel's studies of organic forms and Herzog's Encounters.