viz. - Disaster

Overexposed to Natural Disaster?

Jenn Shapland — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:23:31 +0000

"Ravaged by Typhoon, Philippines Faces Threat of Serious Diseases" on nytimes.com 11.14.2013

I've struggled this week to come up with a topic for viz. It isn't easy to generate new, engaging content week after week. But I was scrolling through various social media platforms this morning, and checking the news, and it was all business as usual until I came across the image above of the first mass grave dug this week in the Philippines for victims of Typhoon Haiyana.

In a time when it's easier and faster than ever to be informed about events across the globe, and when we confront images daily of places we will never visit or perhaps imagine on our own, I'm struck by how little I've seen from the Philippines this week. It's been a busy week, certainly, and a variety of local news stories (plus that "what-would-I-say" bot) have taken clear precedence on my Facebook feed. Still, I can't help but wonder if my limited encounter with images from this most recent weather disaster is a sign of something other than info glut.

As climate change continues and weather events grow more frequent and extreme, is it possible that we've started to become immune to even monumental, city-destroying catastrophes? Are we overexposed to the destruction of entire cities and populations? Ordinarily I'd want to critique these images and the way they're presented in Western news media, perhaps talk about aestheticization of ruin and disaster victims. However, we have to actually look at the images first, yes? And I don't want to preach, here, because I'm holding myself responsible for not paying close enough attention. Perhaps you've all been far more tuned in. But, on the off chance you haven't, I'd like to stop talking for a second and provide a few images, linked to their news stories, of a devastating, ongoing loss overseas that deserves our awareness and consideration.

"Logistical Hurdles Paralyze Relief Effort at Center of Tyhpoon's Fury" on nytimes.com 11.13.2013

"Typhoon Haiyan: Everything You Need to Know" on theguardian.com 11.14.2013

"Typhoon Haiyan highlights global cost of climate change" on america.aljazeera.com 11.14.2013

"Tacloban: City at the Center of the Storm" on bbc.com 11.12.2013

Part II: Suspense is Better than Action

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:31:11 +0000

Image Credit: National Archives image (208-N-43888)

Part II: An Objection is Entertained

Last week I argued that suspense makes for more arresting visual effect than does what passes for “action” in Hollywood these days. My main point was that human frailty creates suspense and that psychological realism will do much to improve action cinema. Bigger visuals are not necessarily better at creating an emotional response in the viewer.

Now, you may say to me: Chris, you are not taking into sufficient account how big real visual events have become.

You act as if we lived in the forties still; you seem to want an action cinema which would treat destructive action as if it rarely happened. But it happens every day, and has happened diurnally for some time now, and a few times on a grand scale.

Admittedly, the world has gotten a lot more frightening; it is indeed, as Cormac McCarthy found a way to express it, no country for old men. All the more reason to adhere to psychological realism! When “death looks gigantically down” (Poe), we feel it more gigantically, I would argue, when it is measure against something like sanity, or just plain safety. Sheriff Bell provides that measure, in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005). The Coen brothers, who adapted McCarthy’s novel into the best action/suspense thriller of which I am aware, never lose sight of it either.

Note, for instance, how the camera “eyes” firearms in the scene excerpted below from the film version of No Country (2007). (Warning, the violence in this scene, unlike that of many action movies, is disturbing.)

Courtesy: No Country For Old Men (2007)

The viewer does not see the firearm until the penultimate moments. Instead, we see Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) eyeing something very uneasily. When a firearm discharges, it is a very frightful thing, even when you are certain you will not be shot. The vast majority of action movie makers have forgotten this, and they are to be blamed for their lapse. The Coen brothers and McCarthy, by contrast, eye a gun in the way that you would if it were in the room with you.

Hollywood, do you want to arrest the viewer’s attention: then treat guns as the awful instruments of destruction and nihilism that they are. A person is made of most supplicating flesh, and a bullet of the most indifferent lead.

It is true -- and this is our tragedy -- that very many of the world’s suffering denizens live intimately with the continual threat of firearms and even massive explosives. Weapons are not less frightening for being ubiquitous; they are all the more terrifying for that. As William Faulkner could say by 1950: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” What McCarthy and the Coen brothers have shown is how this question becomes a problem of the spirit. You cannot show this, I think, with visual effect alone, hence the crucial importance to No Country of Sheriff Bell’s narrated monologues.

Hollywood, I believe you are well aware of the Faulknerian condition; but I think you are going about exorcising our demons all the wrong way. Observe this scene from the highly entertaining but all too scopophilic Independence Day (1996):

Courtesy: Independence Day (1996)

What are we doing when we imagine the total destruction of famous buildings? We are warding off the evil spirits.

“But alas,” writes Mike Davis (Dead Cities and Other Tales, 2003) “they have come after all; brandishing box-cutters. Although movies, like kites and women’s faces, were banned in the Hindu Kush version of utopia, the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. (on September 11, 2001) were organized as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise-en-scène.” The U.S., in Davis’s view, has responded to cinematic terrorism cinematically: “The ‘Attack on America,’ and its sequels, ‘America Fights Back’ and ‘America Freaks Out,’ has continued to unspool as a succession of celluloid hallucinations, each of which can be rented from the corner video shop: The Siege, Independence Day, Executive Action, Outbreak, The Sum of All Fears, and so on.”

The dog which escapes the destruction in the scene excerpted from Independence Day (1996) says it all. Blow-em-up action cinema is every bit as much a response to the Faulknerian condition as is No Country For Old Men. But where that movie presents a problem of spirit, the blow-em-ups are trying to make us laugh it off; or are they trying to immunize us against our fears. Faulkner again: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.”

Please, Hollywood -- I do not plea with but beg of you -- do not compete with reality for grandiosity of visual effect! We are sick to death with the visual reality of unimaginable events, and the way to heal is not to match on the silver screen, in super high definition, each new cataclysm.

River Rising Part II, May 2011

Doreen Piano — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:26:19 +0000

River Rising is a series of original photos by Dr. Doreen Piano of University of New Orleans. Dr. Piano works in Rhetoric and Composition, with ongoing work on a digital archive of writing and photography related to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.

River Rising Part I

Doreen Piano — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 23:15:40 +0000

In May 2011, the Mississippi River rose to unprecedented heights, threatening a worst-case scenario of massive flooding throughout metropolitan New Orleans and other outlying regions.Two spillways north of the city opened that month diverting waters into Lake Ponchartrain and the Atchafalaya Basin, but the river still ran high through June.

"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.

Media Sensationalism and the Crisis in Japan

ladysquires — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Time Magazine)

Following on the heels of Megan, Cate, and Elizabeth, I've been monitoring media coverage of the disaster in Japan and coming across some interesting points for debate. I found this Time cover shortly after reading an anonymous letter to Talking Points Memo by a Japanese scholar critiquing Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant:

From my perspective as a scholar of Japan at a major American university―one who was also in Japan when the quake hit (I left one day later than scheduled on the 13th)―I must say that the coverage was, with some exceptions, largely substandard: full of factual errors, misconceptions, and bent towards sensationalism and alarmism. It is very unfortunate that this poor coverage will probably result in many Americans having false conceptions of Japan for years to come.

The writer takes the Western media to task, citing several specific examples of inaccurate reporting over the past week, particularly the consistent portrayal of relief workers as desperate and overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation. Conversely, he or she argues that reporting within Japan, "has been largely calm, rational, informed, and critical. Some of this is naturally to avoid creating panic, but it has been able to do that because as a whole it has answered many of the questions people have and thus gained a certain level of trust. As a media scholar, I can pick this coverage apart for its problems, and of course point to information that is still not getting out there, but on the whole it is functioning as journalism should." Indeed, Japan Probe's screen caps of coverage of the same event from both the Huffington Post and the BBC reveal that U.S. coverage tends to be more sensationalist:

The letter writer acknowledges that sensationalism sells and notes that foreign journalists reporting from Japan "do not have the language capabilities to access Japanese media," but he or she also argues that

[T]he coverage is rooted in long-standing prejudices held by some Westerners against the non-West: for instance, a superiority complex that feels only the West and its media have real access to the truth, which led to a downplaying of Japanese media reports. In the worst cases, there has been simple racism, as some reporters when viewing how calm the Japanese are, seem to think the Japanese are mere robots who cannot grasp the immensity of the crisis or, as one colleague reports when a Spanish reporter interviewed her, think that the Japanese are genetically tuned to accept disaster.

...
But worst of all, the inordinate and sensationalist attention given to the reactors by American and other media has taken attention away from where it should be: on the likely nearly 20,000 people who died in the quake and tsunamis, on the nearly 400,000 homeless people, and on the immense suffering this has caused for Japan as a whole. I cannot but think that the low amounts of donations given by Americans to relief efforts is not at least partially the result of this warped coverage.

Indeed, the nuclear crisis, which at first was merely one of the many destructive consequences of the quake, now threatens to become the entire story. And while the nuclear crisis and its long-term implications for the Japanese are certainly worth attending to, the casualties that have resulted from that particular problem are so dwarfed by the death toll and economic damage caused by the initital quake that I begin to wonder why it has received such a disproportionate amount of coverage. Perhaps it is simply the fact that the quake and tsunami are over and done, while the events and the reactor are a developing story. Perhaps Westerners are simply more interested in the story because it has potential implications for us, as seen in the fact that some people in California have begun taking (entirely unneccessary) iodine tablets and the fact that this disaster has sparked huge debate about nuclear energy in the U.S. (the consequences of relying on coal and oil for energy have been pretty dire in terms of damage to the environment and cost in human lives, but nuclear energy is more mysterious and thus tends to spark more alarm).

Which brings me back to the Time cover (finally). It strikes me that the editors of the magazine are trying to thread a needle here. They are attempting to cover the nuclear crisis while treating it as part of a much larger story, but I'm not sure they are entirely successful. While the photograph of the crying woman does thankfully avoid the stereotypes described above and seems to commemorate the disaster as a whole, I cannot help but be distracted by the headline. "Japan's Meltdown" centers the nuclear power plant crisis in the mind of the viewer and thereby undermines the work done by the photograph and the line "Earthquake. Tsunami. Nuclear Disaster. Resilience."

Cartooning Crisis - Images After the Japanese Tsunami

Cate Blouke — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Pedro Molina, Managua, Nicaragua "El Nuevo Diario"

Ten days after the cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake in Japan, we have only a small sense of both the immediate and long-term consequences for the country. Political cartoonists world-wide are manipulating the image of the Japanese flag, positioning the crisis as a national tragedy/catastrophe and exploring the aftershocks. The resulting images are interesting for both their visual simplicity and the complex arguments they (inadvertently?) construct.

Addressing the pedagogical implications of images and tragedy, Megan's thoughtful post from Friday opens with another manipulated image of the Japanese flag in which the rising sun has morphed into a tear drop. That image highlights the sorrow of the tragedy - evoking global sympathy for a nation in crisis. Yet from another perspective, the image could also represent a drop of blood - acting as either a memorial for those who died or, theoretically, a call to arms. Though I doubt those are the intended readings, I merely want to point out that even fairly straightforward images can be sites of contestation.

The images above and below strike me as more overtly complex arguments about the disastrous consequences for the nation. In Molina's image, the sun is now a skull, cracked and disintegrating. While the image immediately points toward the massive death toll (8,450 dead and 12,931 missing at the time of writing), it also posits the disaster as crippling (and potentially lethal) for the nation as a whole.

John Sherffius, Colorado, Boulder Daily Camera

Various cartoonists have played with images of fracture and symbolic post-quake cracks, but Sherffius presents a sun severed completely in half. The image posits a rupture, with one half of the nation more grievously effected. Unlike the red teardrop which unifies the nation's grief, Sherffius' image points towards an irrevocable severance.

While the symbolic value of the flag makes it universally recognizable (and superficially simple to read), when cartoonists combine the flag with other "easily recognizable" symbols of Japan, the effects become more opaque.

Damien Glez, Journal du Jeudi, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

Several dozen representations of the Japanese flag combined with the radioactive symbol have emerged in the last week, but they are mostly presented as solitary images - either the flag itself or a deserted flagpole. Damien Glez, however, depicts an anxious samurai waiving the flag aloft. The image is troubling for the way in which it suggests a connection between the radiation crisis, military aggression (a warrior in full dress) and surrender (waiving a white flag). In the post-WWII fallout this image might have made more sense, but it seems both anachronistic and insensitive now.

Political cartoons inevitably exploit stereotypes for both simplicity's sake and for comedic value, but many of the cartoons emerging after the tsunami raise questions about our ability to access and comprehend foreign nations. While the Japanese flag and the image of Godzilla are certainly immediately recognizable, if these are the images through which we understand Japan, what does that say about us?

Paul Zanetti, Australia

Disaster Pedagogy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:38:25 +0000

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

It seems strange to ignore the earthquake and tsunami in a class that is built around discussion of devastating events. We talk about upsetting topics in class, although I do tell students that what they consider "tragic" is open to debate; I have received (very good) papers on, for example, Lindsay Lohan's personal decline and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. However, I think there is a utility to discussing scary or sad events as they happen, too. Making students aware of these moments as rhetorical as they happen seems like a key way to increase day-to-day critical literacy. What is important, I think, is making it clear that seeing the rhetoric in these public images doesn’t take away from the victims’ pain. In this case, it is actually easy to keep their pain in perspective because a potential motive (and a definite effect) of most of these images is to show how heart wrenching this event is. It gives us an opportunity to talk about how photographers show someone else’s pain: through direct images of anguish, of course, but also through the fear and fascination of seeing a building sway or an enormous crack in the ground. We can ask, why are there so many amateur videos of the destruction available online? Why do people want to see this? What work does it do? It can encourage students to think about when images help and when they sensationalize without helping. This particular event also gives us the opportunity to talk about the rhetorical power of animals, since the news coverage features images and stories of animals in peril.

Via Buzzfeed

My concern, of course, is that photographs will be upsetting for one or more students. While we're all adults, and we've certainly looked at some upsetting material before (meth PSAs come to mind), I do want the classroom to be intellectually challenging but still comfortable; students shouldn't feel as if their feelings or personal losses are being disrespected. While that is a concern for practically all of the events we talk about (especially Hurricane Katrina, because of the geographic proximity and huge affected population), there is normally at least a little distance between the class and what happened.

"Support the Tsunami and Quake Relief," Dave CT

We will talk about this event, but in a particular way. I would like students to discuss what they have been seeing, if only briefly: what images appear, and what effects do they have? Why do you think this picture was taken, published, circulated, etc--what is its rhetorical power? Additionally, I'd like to spend some time talking about the art that has come out of the event, like the first and third images in this post. Students have the option to make a poster for their final projects, so I think it is useful for them to see what one might look like. Some, like the Red Teardrop, seem very effective; others, like the image above, are somewhat more confusing for certain audiences, but potentially still persuasive. Talking about these images is relevant to the students' own work and allows us to engage with the images and the event in a way that is less likely to rub salt on a very raw, very recent wound.

Picturing "Severe Weather "

ebfrye — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:11:36 +0000

Image Credit: "Hermine Heads Inland," the Weather Channel

Not only is it the beginning of the semester for us, but it’s hurricane season and we, in central Texas, are feeling the effects of Tropical Depression Hermine. Today, I’d like to share a few visual representations of severe weather and begin an investigation of their effects on the viewing public.

Picturing “severe weather” also frequently implies a consideration of what its aftermath or indeed its “disaster” might look like, given that we often don’t devote a heightened attention to the weather until there is cause for concern. Most commonly, our visual conceptions of severe weather and their corresponding threats of disaster begin with a map. (See Laura T. Smith’s post on other mappings of "disasters" here.)

The above image from the Weather Channel, like others we frequently encounter in other local and national news media, was produced through Doppler radar. Viewers who otherwise are unfamiliar with the workings of Doppler radar can recognize the significance of the color-coded screen imagery that indicates both a storm’s path and precipitation levels.

Perhaps most importantly, these color codes for precipitation often correspond with the possible severity of a particular storm. For a viewing public that often switches between both cable and network channels for weather and national goings-on, such a system communicates its meaning quite easily. The color-coded representations of storm clusters tap into a shared sense of danger, and meteorologists, those persons of science who resemble newscasters, are tasked with emphasizing such warnings. Having grown up in the tornado-ridden South, these Doppler radar maps were the last media-produced images I saw before my mother hurried us to the basement, battery-powered radio in hand.

Yet, what intrigues me is that, in our post-9/11 culture, I can’t help but be reminded of the Homeland Security advisory system whenever I look at one of these weather maps. Perhaps that is the intention? Indeed, the potential strength of weather-related phenomena is visually rendered as a “threat level,” and I have trouble divorcing it from my Bush-era conditioned response to airports and travel advisories. Each time I look at a map of my local area under threat of "severe weather," I am also, rather unconsciously, applying a color-coded, and therefore visual, metaphorics of “terror.”

Consequently, if an awareness of “severe weather” also appears as a highly-charged awareness of “terror,” what other cache of images does that imply?