viz. - photography

“Kids These Days”: The Not-at-all New Phenomenon of Fashionable Childhood Sexualization

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 17:00:06 +0000

Last year, when Miley Cyrus gave us this delight:

Image Credit: Mirror

the interwebs exploded with home critics—often sloppy analyses of Cyrus’s performance, rife with moral judgment and fear for the future. The outrage regards not whether the singer is talented, or whether her show was successful, but over her behavior, and, especially, her clothing.

Of course, a large part of this reaction to the VMA show was due to the “weirdness” of Cyrus’s dances-with-bears schtick. Still, we’d be naive to overlook the role of her clothes in this kind of backseat judgment. Many of the blog posts, op-eds, and social media comments linked the VMA performance with Cyrus’s then-new video, “Wrecking Ball,” pointing out the “provocative” dress as a sign of the girl’s unstable nature or corrupted innocence. “Where is Hannah Montana?” these articles bemoaned. The issue seems to be not only the amount of skin shown, but that Cyrus is a girl dressed too maturely.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

I don’t want to reduce all the pushback here to Cyrus’s age. Of course, this little blowup raises interesting questions about the public performance of one’s sexuality, about an artist’s attempt to transition from child to adult, about the public’s need to police her body. All of those concerns, I take as the given subtext of this kind of event. I’d like to focus, specifically, on the way that this issue has been framed as a kind of violation of maturity, wherein the clothes represent a certain age category, one many audiences see as inconsistent with the performer’s actual—or “appropriate”—level of maturity.

Actually, this kind of link between clothing and age is a strange inverse of what M. Gigi Durham calls the “Lolita Effect,” “a construction of sexuality that both exploits and limits sexual expression and agency, and is deliberately focused on young girls.” Here, sex is associated with youth, and young bodies are then co-opted both to support the demands of sexual management and to mobilize standards for older women as well. We see this effect both in the way the Toddlers in Tiaras are dressed as much older, hyper sexualized women and in the way older women are then infantilized. For example:

Image Credit: Oh No They Didn't

Image Credit: Stop Toddlers and Tiaras

Here, we’re outraged because these toddlers are dressed up as women. We cannot tolerate the concept of child sexuality—despite the fact that every solid study on childhood development acknowledges it. On the other hand, these:

Image Credit: Steven Meisel

Madonna did this photoshoot for Vanity Fair in 1992. The public seems to have a love-hate relationship with these images. They serve up female bodies; fashion facilitates the role of the viewer as couch critic, so that we can all bemoan the downhill spiral of the way “Society” is going these days. I think it’s important to include Madonna in this discussion not only because these images offer a counterpart to Toddlers & Tiaras, but also because they remind us that this phenomenon is not in any way new. Durham, for example, charts a whole series of sexualized girls (JonBenet Ramsey, Brooke Shields, The Little Mermaid...). Here, more than two decades ago, we have Madonna performing hyper sexualized girlhood through a fashion shoot. The adult female is sexy because she’s childish. So all of these panicked responses to Miley, the fear-mongering that suggests we have somehow crossed a threshold in the female sex/fashion industry, might do well to remember, as Don Draper tells us in another blithely misogynist episode (s01e04) of Mad Men: “Maybe every generation thinks the next one is the end of it all. Bet there are people in the Bible walking around, complaining about kids today."

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fashion

children

Visual Rhetoric

photography

popular culture

Framing Your Family: The Rhetoric of the Holiday Card Photo

Deb Streusand — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 04:59:02 +0000

Image Credit: scrapcandydesigns

Every year at this time, you have an opportunity to frame your identity through visual rhetoric: the holiday card photo. Holiday card photos provide an opportunity to show off what one is proud of. They allow one to demonstrate originality or humor. They also make arguments about what constitutes a family.

The standard holiday card shows a single photo of a family together, with the text conveying holiday wishes and letting you know whom you’re looking at:

Image Credit: jppblog.com

For many, it’s a chance to show off how adorable one’s family is:

Image Credit: David Orr Photography

The photo often portrays the family getting into the holiday spirit together:

Image Credit: gapmuse.com

Some cards get a little more visually complex, combining other images with the main photo. Here, it gives the family a chance to share a few more images from the same shoot:

Image Credit: A Frame Forward Photography

This couple combines their photo with a painted image:

Image Credit: Perfect Postage

The rendering of the three wise men and the star shares the page with the modern photo of the couple, separated only by their names and the Christmas wish. Using this image allows the couple to suggest how close their lives are to the Bible. Other families use the multi-image holiday card to show off travel and experiences:

Image Credit: lilduckduck.com

The full-color images in the center show the children abroad and at home, so the viewer immediately gets the idea of what the card is about. The many sepia-toned outer images, which fade into the background at first, reward the person who looks further with a greater range of experiences. Whether the image is multiple or single, the holiday card is a great chance to display what you’re proud of about your family.

The card also gives people occasion to show creativity or humor, since the holiday card itself is such a cliché. Some directly mock the idea of demonstrating family closeness through a holiday photo:

Image Credit: bankruptciti.com

The image has the stereotypical family posed in a Christmas-y setting. This family, however, does not pretend to be idyllic. Showing everyone bent over their phones makes the photo perhaps a more realistic portrayal of family than the shining moments captured in professional photo shoots for standard holiday cards. Yet the family is still displaying what it’s proud of – the ironic humor and honesty shown in the photo. Some show off their senses of humor in a more cutesy fashion:

Image Credit: lollyjane.com

Within the fiction (spoiler alert) of Santa’s existence, the family mildly suggests that they have a certain rebelliousness. They defy the standard holiday card, but they still want to show you a cute picture of their family all together wearing nice matching clothes.

Since a holiday card picture traditionally shows a family, every holiday card image also makes the argument that what it shows constitutes a family. As a pet lover, I enjoy the images where people pose with their dogs or cats as other people do with their kids:

Image Credit: christmas-kid.com

Mom, Dad, Rover, Fido: a family. This type of argument, however, can also be turned to more serious purposes. Last holiday season, a GLAAD campaign sent holiday card photos of gay couples to the governors of states in which gay marriage was not yet legal. They used a holiday card photo image to advertise the campaign:

Image Credit: GLAAD

Cute smiling kids, holiday wishes, family name, date, white text on red, snowflakes – this image has all the elements of the standard holiday card. It’s a family holiday card, so this must be a family. Cooper Smith Koch, one of the two dads pictured, told GLAAD that he wanted Rick Perry to “see the love that we have for our children and how it's the same as the love he has for his.” Here, the holiday card makes the argument that if it looks like a family, it is a family, regardless of the details.

As you make your holiday cards this season, remember visual rhetoric! What argument do you want your card to make about your family?

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photography

Visual Rhetoric

holidays

Texan Political Photo Ops with Guns

Deb Streusand — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 19:34:14 +0000

Politicians love a good prop. They pose with everything from babies to tanks. For Texas politicians, a crucial photo op is the one that establishes the subject’s relationship with guns. The benchmark for such pictures is the iconic Annie Leibovitz photo of Ann Richards, above. Richards’ pose is relaxed but alert. She is clearly at home holding her gun, which points diagonally to the ground as she chats with the woman on the left. The black and white image gives a classic dignity to the scene of trees and fields, conveying the impression that the photo dates from the early twentieth century rather than the early 1990s. Richards’ pants, button down shirt, pocketed vest and bandanna tied around the neck create a formal version of the cowboy aesthetic. This image is quite distinctly Texan.

In January, Richards’s son Clark presented Richards’s shotgun to Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. Naturally, Davis posed with the gun for a photo op.

While the Richards photo captures what appears to be a candid moment of relaxation during a hunt, Davis is clearly orchestrating this image. She is standing in front of three US and two Texas flags, self-consciously promoting the idea that she is part of Texan and American gun culture. She wears a suit jacket and skirt, an unlikely outfit in which to use a hunting gun. She holds the gun to her left and diagonally downwards, perhaps quoting the Richards image, but the angle is slightly different. Whereas Richards would hit the ground if her gun accidentally went off, Davis’s fire would catch the lower body of whoever was unlucky enough to be standing to her left on the speaking platform. The position of Davis’s arms is angular and tense. She does not seem to have Richards’s natural and easy relationship to her gun.

Davis’s opponent, Greg Abbott, posed with a gun for the cover of Texas Monthly.

Abbott slings the gun casually over his shoulder. Unlike Richards and Davis, he holds the gun in one hand, so that he could not easily fire if he needed to. The gun points horizontally, which could be dangerous, but he appears to have no company but the camera. Like Richards, Abbott is pictured in a field with a background of trees. He wears jeans and a button down shirt, a more realistic hunting outfit than Davis’s suit and somewhat similar to Richards’s dress in her photo. His body is relaxed. Like Davis, he smiles at the camera, more self-conscious than the remote Richards.

Both gubernatorial candidates appear to quote the Richards image in their photo ops. Davis, actually holding a gun that belonged to Richards, mimics the angle of Richards’s gun in the photo. Abbott wears clothing similar to Richards’s and appears against a similar backdrop. The Abbott image is closer to the Richards image in tone, and conveys a comparable sense of comfort with a gun. The Davis image is more artificial and somewhat awkward. It seems to be a less successful use of the Richards imagery.

Some conservative bloggers have taken the awkwardness of the Davis image as evidence for Davis’s failure at being a “badass.” They imply that Davis’s credibility on gun issues is as lacking as her comfort with guns appears to be in the photo. This interpretation shows the risk of such photo ops. The photo can align poorly with the beliefs or abilities the politician is trying to promote. The Davis photo attempts to convey how Texan and gun-friendly Davis is, but it fails because of the staged indoor background, Davis's unhunterly clothing, and her awkward posture, which add up to an unsuccessful attempt to show the same confident relationship with guns that is portrayed in the Richards image. The rhetoric of a photo op can be difficult to control, especially if the politician uses a prop with such powerful associations as a gun.

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politics

Visual Rhetoric

photography