Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

Calliope — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:31:45 +0000

Image Credit: minted.com

Choosing a holiday card is apparently a big deal. I was not aware of this until my sister (married with two children) called me in distress over designing her card. As we talked and I pressed her to explain how this could possibly be stressful, I learned that the tradition of sending out greeting cards around the holidays isn't just about spreading good cheer. The rise of the photocard has made holiday salutations into an important opportunity for families to make a positive visual impression on friends and relatives. This surprised me a little because I had naively assumed the intent was to express one's hot-cocoa-induced feelings for the cards' recipients. But considering that media today is increasingly social, targeted, and customizable, the practice of creating a visual brand for one's family and sharing it with others should come as no surprise at all.

Image Credit: minted.com

What's interesting about the way this tradition has evolved is its correspondence to an emphasis on carefully mediated photography in popular social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.). The photocard puts the family portrait front-and-center, replacing seasonal or religious iconography with family faces; and the photos that are included are often professionally taken, or at the very least posed, cropped, edited, and thoughtfully arranged. In my sister's circle of thirty-something friends, it's much more common to exchange customized photocards than store-bought cards with a candid snapshot thrown inside. Her friends use custom stationary sites like minted.com and tinyprints.com to create their distinct family look with carefully chosen photos and a prominent byline (see "The Jones Family 2012," and "The Laurants" above). Affixing the family name to a controlled, manufactured image of its members gives the card a corporate feel; the examples above could easily be ads for clothing stores (just replace "The Laurants" with Eddie Bauer or J. Crew).

These cards aren't very subtle about their aims. Their purpose is to construct a familial identity just as Facebook pages and online bios construct identities for individuals. The fact that they perform an authorized, identity-building function for families--groups as opposed to individuals--makes them fascinating and unique social objects. As I looked through pages of sample cards on the aforementioned sites, I tried to think of other widely-observed rituals or spaces in which families present carefully crafted images of themselves. Aside from engagement photos, and possibly birth announcements, which these photocards clearly draw upon, I could not think of many other occasions for publicly presenting a pre-fab image of the nuclear family. And then I remembered those stick figure families.

Image Credit: gorestruly.com

You know, the pictographic sticker-inventories of families displayed on the back of cars (see above). At first these bare representations might strike you as fundamentally different than the holiday photocards, which include a much more intimate portrait of the family. But I suspect that the decision to put these stickers on the back of one's car is related to the basic impulse behind the photocard: to advertise that you have a family, indicate its size, show that it is happy and thriving, and embrace group identity over individuality.

Image Credit: minted.com

Holiday cards that double as yearly newsletters seem to combine intimate presentations of the family with statements about their size, uniformity, group behavior. In the past, families might have sat down together during the holidays to write a long, usually humorous missive about what they experienced or accomplished that year. Now, sites like Minted encourage us to create and share infographics that measure our family's growth in stats and figures.

And now I will try my hardest not to leave you with an anti-commercialist, Grinch-like message, nor a moralizing one (even though these are two of my favorite postures). I will admit that after spending time on the virtual Hallmark aisle of our day, I can understand where my sister is coming from. Projecting an image of one's family is a delicate affair, and not an easy thing to opt out of. Almost any card, whether it's store-bought, handmade, digital, or photographic, will say something about how you want your family's values, traditions, class and lifestyle to be perceived. So choose wisely, and have a wonderful holiday season.

What's Eating You? Viewer Expectations and Food Art

Megan Eatman — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 02:32:36 +0000

Image (and recipe): Chow

When I discovered the true nature of the image above, which appeared to be a delicious carrot cake, I felt an unexpected disgust. Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian with a sweet tooth, so the fact that what appeared to be cake was, in fact, ground turkey was pretty gross to me. However, I imagine that someone who had been dooped might initially feel the same way, before, perhaps, shifting into delight that an entire Thanksgiving dinner had been contained in one slice, and so masterfully. My reaction, however extreme, made me think about food as a medium, the arguments it makes, and the arguments we make about it.

An interesting example is the KFC Double Down, which received criticism less because of its actual nutritional content (not as bad as you think, especially compared to other fast food sandwiches) but because of its iconic representation of American overconsumption, particularly of animal protein and fat. The Double Down, which Mark Morford labels "a horrible crapbucket of chyme," represents everything from the perverse side of low-carb dieting to the horrors of American meat production. It makes an apparently apocalyptic argument--but, also, an argument for deliciousness, at least in its professional photos. Customer action shots are sometimes less savory, at least for some audiences:

Image: Treehugger

Obviously, an argument made with or by food has appeals that function differently; an audience could be more physically moved by appeals to their hunger (or desire to taste something good) or by disgust. The Thanksgiving cake also made me think of Stephen J. Shanabrook, who uses chocolate to create representations of dead bodies, many based on actual corpses.

Image: Stephen J. Shanabrook

Shanabrook's "Waterboarding" pieces are somewhat more subtle, but potentially more haunting:

Image: Stephen J. Shanabrook, via Eat Me Daily

While Shanabrook's work is obviously at a different end of the spectrum from the Thanksgiving cake, I think it is productive to ask, in all these cases, what arguments do these foodstuffs make? Presumably, the mimicry in the Thanksgiving cake makes a definitional argument (I am a cake) and then expands the eater's expectations of what being a cake means. The Double Down reads in different ways, but it (or, rather, its creators) has often been accused of unfair persuasion, abusing for profit humans' natural inclination toward fatty foods. Shanabrook's pieces take the fragility and beauty of chocolate and shape it into the grotesque and the shameful; however, the ephemerality of chocolate seems consistent with the rapid decomposition of a corpse or the unseen impact of "clean torture" like waterboarding.

Discussion of creations like these could be useful in a classroom for expanding students' attitudes about medium. Since we have obvious expectations of what a cake, a sandwich, and a chocolate sculpture look like, all of these creations use medium to frustrate our expectations in a way that might not be immediately clear in other kinds of texts.

viz. - holidays

Presenting the Family: A Holiday Ritual

What's Eating You? Viewer Expectations and Food Art