Word and Image Based on Room with a View

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/04/opinion/20101205_Windows.html

Visual/RHETORIC?

What's It All About, Gunther?

Given Faigley’s perspective, what does Kress add to the mix? Given your perspective on visual rhetoric, what does Kress add to the mix?

Can good design save the newspaper?

Well, not by itself.

But Jacek Utko argues that it does matter--perhaps more than we originally thought. He demonstrates how employing a new design that amplifies the visual's presence has resulted in an increase in newspaper circulation over a three year span. He also smartly acknowledges that this isn't just about design, but about design and content.

This presentation (see: link below) is over a year old, so some of you might have stumbled across it already, but I nonetheless found it quite interesting and, of course, germane to our class discussions the past few weeks.

Enjoy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper.html

Abu Grabe and Sontag Revisited

Here is a review of a new book asking some of the same questions that we did when we read Sontag and discussed the Abu Grabe photographs.

By Evan R. Goldstein

What does it mean to look at a photograph of someone about to be murdered? While a corpse can be shocking and grotesque, at least that person is no longer suffering. It is altogether thornier, Susie Linfield writes in her new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence(University of Chicago Press), to glimpse a person who is still alive but won't be for long. Linfield describes these pictures as the "most morally vexing photographic genre." Should we still look? Why? How?

Linfield, director of the cultural-reporting program at New York University, delves into the darkest corners of the 20th century. Reproduced in the book, for example, are pictures of a prisoner in Stalin's gulag (executed days later), a child in a Khmer Rouge torture facility (also murdered), and a skeletal woman in the Warsaw Ghetto. "She looked as though she was about to topple over and die the next moment," the photographer, a German soldier, later recalled.

More than a million Nazi-produced photographs survived World War II, including thousands from Auschwitz, where official photographers were stationed. These images—the sanitized, whitewashed ones, at least—were relatively commonplace. In 1936 a German magazine published a photo essay blandly titled "Concentration Camp Dachau."

Much rarer are pictures snapped by Jews and other victims of the Nazis. Four such photos were taken clandestinely by prisoners at Auschwitz—corpses being incinerated, naked women en route to the gas chambers—and featured in a 2001 exhibit in Paris. The display sparked a contentious debate. An art critic who defended the exhibit was accused of "voyeurism, pagan idolatry, irresponsible aestheticism, and fetishistic perversion."

Such denunciations personify a strain of thought that Linfield characterizes as "rejectionist." Photographs that depict scenes of humiliation and degradation are more than documents of cruelty, the rejectionists argue, they are themselves acts of cruelty. To look at them is an insult to the dead. One such critic, Janina Struk, writes about the victims of the Holocaust: "They had no choice but to be photographed. Now they have no choice but to be viewed by posterity. Didn't they suffer enough the first time around?" Perhaps the most prominent rejectionist is the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. In Shoah, his nine-hour Holocaust movie from 1985, he refused to incorporate any documentary footage. He has since denounced the "absurd cult of the archival image," which, he argues, petrifies thought and "kills any power of evocation."

Linfield disagrees. "We do not honor the victims by being too delicate—too respectful—to look," she writes. In a recent interview, she adds: "The Nazi photographs are grotesque and sadistic, but we should not shield ourselves from such images. Anyone who wants to understand the experience of destruction, degradation, and humiliation would do well to look at these photographs."

Enlarge Image

Enlarge Image

The Cruel Radiance is more than an argument about the ethics of Holocaust representation—much more. The book opens with a provocative question: Why do photography critics hate photography? Linfield laments the work of critics who see photographs as a "powerful, duplicitous force to defang rather than an experience to embrace and engage." The field, she says, "is saturated with cynicism and distrust, which are mistaken for sophistication and smartness."

She traces this attitude back to the Frankfurt School critics, who were suspicious of popular culture, and especially the relationship between emotion and photography. Linfield's intellectual bête noire, however, is Susan Sontag, whose 1977 book, On Photography, Linfield argues, cultivated a tone of disdain among a generation of critics. "Sontag is compelling and often brilliant, but she has an antipathy toward photography, which she describes as a murder and an assassination, a deception and a manipulation, and a cheap form of knowledge," Linfield says. Instead, she argues for criticism that engages with images analytically and emotionally, that responds to photographs, not just deconstructs them. After all, she says, "photographs are uniquely capable of bringing us close to experiences of suffering and bodily harm."

Is No More

The boy is 7, maybe 8 years old. He stands on a rubble-strewn street in Warsaw in 1943 wearing a cap, knee-high socks, a coat, and a look of terror. His arms are raised. Gathered around him are women and children. It is a scene of chaos, save for the Nazi soldiers, calm-faced, guns in hand. In a new book, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (Hill and Wang), Dan Porat, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, weaves a tight narrative from the stories of people, both Nazis and Jews, whose lives converged in this iconic photo.

Where the facts aren't known—and much about this photograph remains unknown—Porat relied on his imagination. That approach, he explains, allowed him to take a fresh look at what, to him, is the central question that emerges from the Holocaust: How can one person come to regard another as subhuman?

What is known about the photograph is this: In May 1943, Jürgen Stroop, a general in the SS, commissioned a report to detail and commemorate the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The 125-page document included 52 black-and-white photographs taken by Nazi officials during the campaign. Bound in leather, the book was titled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! A handwritten caption below the picture of the boy reads: "Pulled From the Bunker by Force."

What is not known, among other things, is the identity of the boy. Several people have come forward, most famously a doctor in New York in 1982, but Porat is unconvinced. He does not believe that the boy survived. "Such claims speak to our desire for redemption," he says in an interview. "But there is nothing redemptive about this story. It is an absolute tragedy."

Asked about the picture's enduring relevance, Porat speculates that it has to do with the absence of stark violence. "There are no corpses, no obvious malnutrition." In addition, there is what appears to be a mother-son connection at the center of the frame. "The photograph is laden with this emotional bond that many of us can relate to," Porat says, arguing that the boy's anonymity makes him a universal figure. "He represents six million names."

Visual Rhetoric Everyhwhere

Thanks to Elizabeth for posting the url for these images: what kind of visual rhetoric do we see here?

The NY Times also had a story about images of VP Biden showing up on The Onion, photoshopped images-->http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/business/media/11biden.html?hp

On another social media site I'm on, I was pointed to this rationale for the use of graphic novels in high school:

Grades 9-12

Graphic novels can sometimes face an uphill battle for legitimacy in school libraries and classrooms. Their perceived novelty and resurgence in popularity, as well as several recent cases of attempted censorship by parents and libraries, seem to make them even more suspect than other young-adult titles. Rationales for Teaching Graphic Novels was created to help educators and librarians provide support for the use and inclusion of comics, graphic novels, and manga in the secondary classroom, particularly in the English language arts classroom, and in school and class libraries.

Included on the CD are an explanatory introduction, a genre guide and title list, and more than 100 rationales for graphic novels from almost every genre the form supports: journalism, science fiction, fantasy, slice-of-life realism, superhero, murder mystery, and those that combine genres. Rationales are presented in alphabetical order and include all the information necessary to decide whether a certain work is a good fit for the class: grade level and audience, plot summary, strengths and unique characteristics of the work, possible objections, ideas for implementation, ideas for thematic braidings, awards, reviews, and resources/references. These rationales can be used as part of a contract with parents and administrators that lays out how the texts are to be used and to help teachers feel secure in bringing the text into their classrooms, either on their shelves for independent reading or as part of a curriculum.

FDA wants more visual rhetoric on cigarette packs!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/11/10/131213322/

Vernacular Rhetoric: Signs from the Rally to Restore Sanity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16963133@N02/sets/72157625282129752/detail/

Speaking of Visualizations

Here's one keyed to tweeting candidates for the midterm election. Oddly, it seems to me, the red candidates have more tweets coming their way than the blue candidates. Anyone have a theory on this?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/politics/2010-twitter-candidates.html

Facebook Profile Pic as Genre with Conventions?

click to zoom in

JSTOR's "Data for Research" Beta Edition and TextArc

Just wanted to share what I learned in Digital Scholars today, because there's visual rhetoric written all over it. First, JSTOR is piloting a new project "Data for Research." Take a look here. In essence, this new project represents a new way to mine JSTOR data by utilizing visual tools--bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts. It seems like the humanities are appropriating (is that the right word?) these visual tools more and more. Try it out--and let JSTOR know what you think. By the way, a basic search for the term "visual" delivered the results you see here. There is clearly an increasing appearance of the term in the JSTOR database (although, when you reduce the scale to the past decade, you discover a sharp decline in the term in the past three years. Hmmm). Is this useful?

Next is a project called TextArc--check it out here . Try out the Hamlet or the Alice in Wonderland sample. This project attempts to visualize the connections between words in a text, scanning through the individual words to visualize how they connect.

My question about all this is: so what? Does this help us in our discipline? Are these useful tools that help us think about knowledge and produce useful new knowledge? Or are they merely pedagogical fireworks? And what could Visual Rhetoric's role be in all of this?

Visual Ethics: A List of References

Allen, Nancy (1996). Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing's Not Believing Anymore. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(1), 87-105.

Barton and Barton, Ideology and the Map

Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, White, Linda Feldmeier, Dunn, Patricia, Heifferon, Barbara A., & Cheu, Johnson (2001). Becoming Visible: Lessons in Disability. CCC, 52(3), 368-398.

Caricato, Josephine A. (2000). Visuals for Speaking Presentations: An Analysis of the Presenter's Perspective of Audience as a Partner in Visual Design. Technical Communication, 47(4), 496-514.

Darley, Andrew. Simulating Natural History: Walking With Dinosaurs as Hyper-Real Edutainment

Dombrowski, Paul (2003). Ernst Haeckel's Controversial Visual Rhetoric. Technical Communication Quarterly, 12(3), 303-319.

Dragga, Sam (2003). Hiding humanity: Verbal and visual ethics in accident reports. Technical Communication, 50, 61-82.

Dragga, Sam, & Voss, Dan (2001). Cruel Pies: The Inhumanity of Technical Illustrations. Technical Communication, 48(3), 265-274.

Fahnestock, visual tropes/visual rhetoric

Gould, Stephen Critique of the "march of progress of mankind"

Kienzler, Donna "Visual Ethics" in the Journal of Business Communication (Vol. 34, 1997)

Kostelnick and Roberts, Designing Visual Language.

Manning, Alan, & Amare, Nicole (2006). Visual-rhetoric Ethics: Beyond Accuracy and Injury. Technical Communication, 53(2), 195-211.

McCandless, David The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia by

Richards, Anne R., & David, Carol (2005). Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web. Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 31-48.

Scott, J. Blake (2003). Extending Rhetorical-Cultural Analysis: Transformations of Home HIV Testing. College English, 65(4), 349-367.

Voss, Dan, & Flammia, Madelyn (2007). Ethical and Intercultural Challenges for Technical Communicators and Managers in a Shrinking Global Marketplace.Technical Communication, 54(1), 72-87.

Vernacular Visual Rhetoric

What Muslims wear: see http://muslimswearingthings.tumblr.com/

What Does the Display of Visual Information Add?: Your Choice

We’ve now considered various dimensions of visual rhetoric, including the more utilitarian located in yet another history. Choose one of these questions. What is the role of history in shaping visual rhetoric? What is required for an adequate theory of visual rhetoric?

Visualizing the Great Recession

Some of you may have already seen this, but I found this essay on NYTimes.com on photojournalism and the recession via a blog post by George Packer in The New Yorker. Seems more than relevant to our semester in general and this past week's class in particular.

American Gothic Redux

From the NYTimes today, a picture of pot farmers that reminded me of American Gothic. Anyone else?

My point is that not all visual quotations (eg, Ground Zero) have to be somber. Some of them are amusing, calling into question the icon as as well what the icon represents.

Catalog Living

I found this site a couple of weeks ago and with the Tange reading it seems like a perfect time to share.

The writer takes images from home decorating sites and mocks the uselessness and emptiness of most "middle class" decorating by creating a family that lives in the pages. It takes a couple of images and captions to get into her joke, but once you're in...it's hilarious.

Catalog Living

The syllabus asks, "We’ve had competing theories as to the epistemology of the visual. Qua Berger, it’s narrative; qua some authors in HH, it’s argument. What does seeing visuals as rhetorical add to the mix?" Now it might be that you see narrative and argument as overlapping. It might be that you'd like to add another epistemological paradigm into the mix. It might be that you'd like to focus on the role of emotion in knowing. At the end of the day, what does all this have to do with visual rhetoric?

And why might I choose this image for this SRR?

Visual Rhetoric: Definition by Community

Visual Rhetoric is a perspective on interpreting objects or an artifact. Additionally, Helmer states that rhetoricians are engaged with the ways vis. images are carriers of meaning. She also considers image making as a semiotic practice, and meaning making is a transaction (Helmers) among the image maker, the audience, and the context. Goggin defines context as spatial, temporal, and material. In other words, it's so ambiguous that it escapes a concrete definition.from Kendra and Sonny :)

Visual Rhetoric :• That which is visual (including the visual nature of alphabetic texts)• Rhetorical o Act of human construction o Involves intent or purpose (on the part of the rhetor and/or the audience) o Involves a transactional making of meaning (between artifact, creator, audience, and context) o Contains the potential for an argument (created by either the artist or audience); it acts as a vehicle (maybe a vessel) for argumentation Natalie and Larkin (the most awesomest)

Jessica and Katie


Visual Rhetoric:
- Continuum of aesthetic to vernacular
- Ambiguity
- Longevity
- Object, artifact, image
- Based on personal experience and the viewer along with the audience
o Transactional relationship between creator and viewer
o Transactional relationship between creator and visual
o Transaction relationship between visual viewer
- Narrative
- Context
- Circulation

- Increased circulation à increased rhetoricity

- As the viewer experiences images that personal experience is transactional both in terms of creator and viewer as well as viewer and image.

From Jenn and Rory:"We approached visual rhetoric in one of two ways: the composing of a visual artifact and the analysis of a visual artifact. Here, the two are dependent on one another (that is, one cannot analyze an artifact that isn’t created) but the two acts can be mutually exclusive. In terms of analysis, one must decide first what falls under the category of visual artifact and then what frame one wants to use to conduct that analysis."

visual rhetoric is the practices and the artifacts of graphic representation (Goggin) that performs work (possibly persuasive or cultural) on an audience.Leigh and Elizabeth

Aesthetics/Vernacular

I think it is difficult to draw a bright line between the vernacular and the aesthetic. Helmers divides the two in terms of naïve vs. knowledgeable viewers. Helmers seems to be talking about the “Aesthetic” with a capital “A,” meaning a specifically defined museum or Artworld (also with a capital “A”) conceptualization of aesthetic experience, context/frame of reference, and evaluation criteria, which together comprise what Helmers calls “appropriate socially coded levels of seeing” (82). Although Helmers clearly has issues with this idea of the Aesthetic, in terms of how it operates as what Goggin would call a class-bound threshold separating Artworld insiders and outsiders, Helmers’ division of naïve and knowledgeable viewers fails to recognize the conscious aesthetic frameworks that define so-called vernacular visual expressions. Goggin’s history of samplers, especially their early history in which samplers were used and circulated as inventive sources for creating images, demonstrates their aesthetic framework – their media, techniques, contexts, and criteria for judging quality.

Perhaps what makes needlework, as opposed to oil painting, vernacular is its grassroots, non-Artworld origin. So, is vernacular imagery defined as non-Artworld imagery? But don’t many non-Artworld image-making contexts have their own aesthetic thresholds that divide insiders from outsiders? Josh talked about graffiti as a vernacular artform. In one sense, I can agree – it is grassroots, urban, and outside formal systems of Artworld support. However, graffiti writers (yeah, they’re called writers, since much of their imagery includes words – talk about your semasiographic vs. glottographic systems!) operate within highly coded contexts that function aesthetically and territorially – i.e., tagging. As an outsider to the graffiti scene, I might be able to construct my own narratives to make meaning from graffiti I see and admire, but I lack the graffiti-specific aesthetic knowledge to “fully” understand it.

(re)Location, Narrative, and Meaning

I’ll start by clarifying that I see the vernacular as a flexible classification of art and the aesthetic as an element of art is general, and thus an element of the vernacular. The “everyday,” in my opinion, has a distinct aesthetic that functions in specific ways that engender its “everydayness.”
As I thought about the relationship between the vernacular and how we see, Marguerite Helmers came to mind. She discusses the importance of narrative in understanding/making meaning in the visual. In displaying an image, a curator will seek to (re)construct a narrative that frames our understanding of the art. This builds on the narrative that the viewer shapes and relies on as a way of making/finding meaning in the piece. The fodder of this narrative, however, is not only what is visible before the viewer. Helmers observes that although a spectator may be naïve about “painterly symbolism, the spectator may be quite sophisticated with narrative options, learned from the realm of the visual an verbal cultural imaginary.” I think that it is the nature of this narrative that contributes to the characterizes the vernacular as well as how and what we see in "the everyday."

As we construct narratives around the vernacular, these narratives are more immediate than the narratives that we construct around, say, “high art.” Let’s take, for example, the silhouettes in the iPod’s popular ad campaign. The vernacular function of these images is emblematic of the vernacular in general. In these silhouettes, strategically placed in various contexts as they are, we can literally fill ourselves – or some fantasy of ourselves -- into the image. There is a rather literal space for us in these images as they simultaneously reflect and materialize a piece of our lived experience.
Another example is the several mosaics found in Pompeii of dogs lying on the floor. Often found in the entryway of homes, we are able to locate ourselves within these images in an immediate and material way. The narrative that we construct, as did contemporaries of these images, is one in which we are active participants and respondents. These images are in active dialogue with the material circumstances that surround us.

Although non-vernacular art enters and shapes our experience, it is not, I think in active and material dialogue with the materialities that we most immediately embody. We cannot, as with high art, embody the narratives that we construct as a way of making meaning and seeing ourselves on a local level. This material seeing of ourselves is an indication of the more narrow aesthetic functioning in the vernacular. As “the aesthetic” varies in both degree and kind, the aesthetic of the vernacular is shaped by circulation and context. The vernacular can be read through its circulation in the everyday (here, an acknowledgment of the different “vernaculars” that exist in our society).


For example, I think that the Mona Lisa has become vernacular. This reflects the changing aesthetic of the image. Here, I am suggesting that this is largely attributable to the increased circulation and the subsequent presence of this image in our daily lives. The Mona Lisa has become an image where thenarrative constructed as a way of making meaning is significantly different from the narrative constructed by viewers who only saw the image displayed in the Louvre. Here again, we are seeing broader circulation and increased circulation (ie we see it more frequently and in more forms – coffee cup, etc.).
As for the relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric: Helmers articulates a critical component of the relationship between the above and visual rhetoric when she writes that visual rhetoricians “consider the temporal and spatial implications of context: the ways in which the meaning of a single image can alter dramatically due to placement, context, cropping and captioning.” To this, I would add circulation. However, when we are considering the rhetoricity of an image both the vernacular and the aesthetic are contingent upon and often relative to individual contexts from which narratives emerge that encase our understandings of images as well as the overlapping and divergent flows of images through and around these contexts – flows that locate meaning on a soda bottle, in a museum, or on the sidewalk.

Josh and Katie in the Kitchen: On the Vernacular and the Aesthetic

Katie and I were standing in the kitchen on Sunday evening discussing this question while we were trying to make popcorn balls. During our discussion, we were both alternating between stirring the hot sugar syrup and trying not to burn the popcorn in the pot. The dark red syrup was bubbling and our talk was punctuated by the sound of popcorn kernels exploding inside the pot (a lame attempt at pictorialism). I think we both agreed that we appreciated Goggins' emphasis on the material and I think we’re both interested in the relationship between circulation and the meaning of images. I mentioned that in one of my SRRs I wrote:

“. . .the fact that images are so pervasive makes me wonder if an essential component of the field of visual rhetoric should also include an investigation of delivery systems. . . These delivery systems may be an important part of my definition of “image” since they seem to define the terms in which we think about and encounter images. . .”

First, I see these “delivery systems” as the location of meaning in images. Helmers states that “[m]eaning is not located in the object itself” (65). Similarly, I would argue that the images themselves don’t contain any meaning but rather the meaning is determined via its delivery system(s). In other words, the delivery system determines the context in which the image is delivered; this context then determines how the image is interpreted. The delivery system operates much like a caption, although less explicitly—it encourages how an image should be read. The reach of the particular delivery systems determines how much meaning can be derived from the image—the greater the reach, the more multiple its meanings (I’m thinking especially of Ground Zero Spirit as a good example). The extent of this reach (and thus the extension of meaning) is based upon material factors that both produce and reproduce the image. Ground Zero Spirit was reproduced extensively (as were many September 11th images) and innumerable meanings were, as a result, generated. In particular, I see the material through which an image is delivered as fundamental to a reading of an image. Goggins argues that “[a]ll discursive practices may be best understood as material practices” and I agree since delivery systems are material constructs (89).
In any case, there seem to be two factors that potentially determine whether an artifact is deemed vernacular or not. First, like Ground Zero Spirit, an artifact has such a broad, wide reach that its audience is extensive; second, the artifact appears in a context deemed to be “vernacular.” In the first case, because an image is so ubiquitous, there are opportunities for others to re-interpret and, more commonly, remix the image. What could be more ubiquitous than the Starbuck’s logo?

In the second case, whether an artifact is deemed “vernacular” depends on the context in which it is placed. Goggins writes that “the materiality of semiotic practices and artifacts is socially, culturally and politically constructed” (89). These constructions have determined at us what contexts/spaces are vernacular or formal/official. These constructions influence our “reading” of the image (and this is why I think an understanding of architecture is so important—it’s appropriate that Hefland starts out with a quote from Tschumi). So, for example, we have street art in which the context is vernacular:
In addition, I tend to think that a context is deemed “vernacular” based upon access; the more broad-based the access, the more likely it will be labelled “vernacular.” The tighter the access (and that includes access to the allocative/authoritative resources), the greater the likelihood that the context would be deemed official or formal (and this is why a discussion of delivery systems should always involve class issues). On the other hand, we have the street artist Banksy who, due to his wide appeal, is crossing over from vernacular spaces to official gallery spaces. I find this cross-over particularly interesting—it would seem like an instance in which official space is attempting to appropriate something from vernacular space. How Banksy’s work is “read” on the street, I think most would agree, is read quite differently from the way it is “read” in the gallery. This brings me to the “aesthetic.”
The term “aesthetic” is the trickier of the two. Whereas I am connecting “vernacular” to a material context in opposition to a “high” context, the “aesthetic” stretches across all contexts. In the case of the Starbuck’s logo or the street art there is an aim towards some type of aesthetic response (either positive or negative) in vernacular contexts. In a formal space, such as a traditional art gallery, the context encourages a specific aesthetic response whereas a vernacular space seems to be self-consciously responding to the “official” aesthetic expectations. Sontag writes that, when photographs are viewed in museum or gallery space, “photographs cease to be ‘about’ their subjects in the same direct or primary way; they become studies in the possibilities of photography” (133). A museum space creates a structure in which we have come to understand that the contents within must be understood as “aesthetic” artifacts in a specific way. I agree with Helmers that “exhibitors are powerful mediators in the reception of texts” (78). Again, it comes down to delivery systems—how an artifact is delivered determines a specific reading, and that is based upon the material that constructs those systems.
What I’ve just suggested seems emphasize the third aspect of visual rhetoric that distinguishes it from the “Sister Arts” tradition—a consideration of “the temporal and spatial implications of context: the ways in which the meaning of a single image can alter dramatically due to placement, context, cropping, and captioning” (64). On top of temporal and spatial I would add material; I think the interrelation of these three factors in context determine the meaning of the image based upon the context and this context influences a particular aesthetic response. What do you all think?

Current Exhibit at the MOMA

Considering our readings and writings this week and our recent shenanigans with Sontag, this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC caught my eye:

"The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other."

Check out the exhibition page here.

New Question: Aesthetic, Vernacular, and Visual Rhetoric

What’s the relationship between two influences—the vernacular and the aesthetic—and how we see today? What’s the relationship between these influences and visual rhetoric?

Two Clips: Decasia and Spiral Jetty

I.
An excerpt from Bill Morrison's eerie Decasia. Morrison edits together found footage of decaying and damaged film and, overlaid with a creepy soundtrack, creates a strange experience. Why is this so unnerving?

It seems to me that the disintegrating film brings our awareness of the materiality of the film to the forefront (and thus an increased awareness of mortality), reminding us even more of the distance of time, heightening that "shock of discontinuity." This seems to confirm for me again that the image content is not nearly as relevant as the material in which the image is formed and presented. I'm not quite sure what that would mean for Visual Rhetoric as a discipline, however...


II.
Sontag writes ". . .photographs have become so much the leading visual experience that we now have works of art which are produced in order to be photographed. In much of conceptual art, in Christo's packaging of the landscape, in the earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, the artist's work is known principally by the photographic report of it in galleries and museums; sometimes the size is such that it can only be known in a photograph (or from an airplane). The photograph is not, even ostensibly, meant to lead us back to an original experience"(147-148). Here is Robert Smithson's film on his (in)famous earth installation Spiral Jetty, a work that is somewhat difficult to access in person. Here, Smithson plays on the idea that the "true" experience of Spiral Jetty can only occur on site, and that the "closest" we will probably get to the work of art is through this film--with Smithson playing the role of a half-serious surrogate.

dw3844 (33 months ago) cool, cool, cool!

A snap-shop of the Current Context of Photographic Knowledge: The picture to the left was captured by "Rachel on holidays (sometimes)" on December 15, of 2007 at 2:15 in the afternoon. She uploaded it to her photostream two days later at 9:46 in the evening. This information is taken from the Exif data for the image. Flickr.com explains: "Exif data is a record of the settings a camera used to take a photo or video. This information is embedded into the files the camera saves, and we read and display it here." This image received seven comments. Similar to what we notice in the filtering of wikipedia, all of the commenters here are ranked "pro." These comments range from someone mistakenly thinking that Rachel had mispelled the type of beer that was mistakenly thought to be pictured, to someone thinking that she might was to get checked out for diabetes because Rachel has been drinking so many San Pellegrinos (commented on in the caption to the image), to someone commenting on how nice her "greens" are.

The image that I have included to the right of "Rachel on holidays (sometimes)" is the camera that she used to take this picture. New on Amazon, this camera costs $400.00. The graph below this image is recording "DMC-TZ1 Usage this Year." So, we see that its popularity on Flickr is dropping off.

1987-2010: The first camera I had was given to me by a neighbor. It was the flat kind that used 110 mm film and had those flash packs with 10 single-use bulbs that snapped on top. Today, I do not own a camera, per say, I have an iPhone with a camera app. Most of my pictures will never be printed.

__________

Question: Given the shifting materiality of the photograph, the shift in ratio between viewing and consuming, and the exponential increase of “noise in the channel” of the photographic, how would you reflect on your assertion that photographic knowledge can never be “ethical or political knowledge”?

Thoughts about this question:

While I’m not sure that this question by itself would be a good one to ask, I’ll trace how I arrived at it. As I say, on page 24 Sontag writes: “The limit of photographic knowledge of the world is that, while it can goad conscience, it can, finally, never be ethical or political knowledge.” It seems, however, that as she nears the end of the text she moves away from this assertion in some fairly substantial ways. While this was plausible in 1973 when most people did not have access to a camera and the process both in terms of materiality and process was much different, today, many more people have access to a technology that can produce, manipulate, and publish their images. For many this process either involves or culminates with the Internet either through a posting site, submission to a printer, or e-mailing relatives.

After discussing photography as a means of appropriation at the beginning of the book, Sontag returns to the topic of power and control towards the end. Here, she discusses “photographic recording” as a means of control. Advancing technologies have made “photography an incomparable tool for deciphering behavior, predicting it, and interfering with it.” In this, photography, like language, is a medium and not an art. These statistics from flickr affirm this: 6,071 images posted “in the last minute,” 558,832 things tagged with urban, and 4.6 million things geotagged this month. Here we are told very little about the content or artistic quality of these images, but lots about photography as a medium of both creation and, perhaps, circulation in the case of flickr.

It is in these later moments of On Photography that Sontag asserts photography’s potential for control “that could not even be dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information: writing.” Here, while we could say that the alphabet itself does not really carry ethical or political knowledge, written compositions (applications of a medium) certainly do. So, if writing is a medium and a system, can we move towards saying that photographic (a medium and a system as well, according to Sontag) knowledge is coming closer to ethical and political knowledge?

Given the above example from flickr, and the countless other examples that we could come up with, the ethical and political knowledge that accompanies a “photographic knowledge,” is perhaps a different way of knowing that is conveyed much differently than other “knowledges” that Sontag may be thinking of when she refers to “photographic knowledge.” When “photographic knowledge” moves from print-dependent to digital – the circulation, the meaning of the image, as well as the kind of knowledge that is produced may be changing. The “atomic reality” that she describes may still be atomic, but the channel is so full of noise that the distance between moments is shrinking as flows of images course through structures that support a digital “photograph knowledge” in the 21^st century, structures that no longer rely on the 110 mm film and flash bulbs of my little pink camera to produce the material that holds them up.

Photography at its best!

It is all about perspective! :)

A NYTimes Feature on Op Eds *and* Their Illustrations Over the Last 40 Years

Pretty interesting to see how the illustrations have/have not changed.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/25/opinion/opedat40.html

Questions for Sontag

Given the changes in the technology of the camera between the time of Sontag’s writing and now, what are the questions you would pose for Sontag today? Why are these questions important, and what do they tell us about visual rhetoric?

NY Times. Perspective, Visual

In today's issue of the Times, there is an article looking at visual representations (think bird's eye views) of suburban sprawl. Worth taking a look:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/09/16/opinion/20100916_gielen-12.html

Chris Marker and Images

Since Sontag mentions the filmmaker Chris Marker, I thought that this would be a good excuse to share his fantastic work. I'm most familiar with his film Sans Soleil--a fascinating rumination about the relationship between images and memory that takes the form of a fictional travelogue. The question of how images are strung together to form a narrative (especially how our images of other cultures help us formulate larger cultural narratives) is central to this film. Marker particularly plays with the dissonance between what is seen (what we construct) and what really is ("reality"--which may not be accessible, especially across cultures). Enjoy:

This is a Hoot

Reverend Luke Murphy appropriates corporate visual rhetoric to explore abstract concepts like fear and shame....it's too funny not to share

http://therecord.blogs.com/withinearshot/2009/02/the-pooptoshame-ratio-and-other-highlights-of-the-best-lecture-ever.html

significance of existence

Image 1

I chose the image of this young man, because it was posted in the Tallahassee Democrat online and received several comments.

Some of the commentors identified the background color as the background for jail photos and therefore, this person's story became affected and the focus of it--the life of this individual--was rendered insignificant by some. It affected the senses of the posters taking their eyes away from the heading Endangered & Missing Tallahassee Man.

In reality the background is similar to that of an FSU student who would go Image 2. missing a year and a half later--and to hundreds of thousands of Floridians who possess a driver's license.

Image 1 is simply a picture of my brother getting a driver's license. A responsible act of a citizen wishing to participate in lawfully in an act that is statutorily controlled. Looking at the background of the picture from this standpoint, questions about his deviance, raised by several commentors on Tallahassee.com and wctv.tv may have been different. However, perhaps not.

Berger states that the for him photography is "foremost a means of expression" that "tells nothing of the significance of existence" but presents us with dual messages wherein a photos of strangers are held to the first which is a message concerning the event photographed. Berger's discussion on page 87 asks readers to imagine losing a loved one to disappearance. He goes on to illustrate the meaning attached to knowledge of subject and the meaning one invents from a subject unfamiliar to them. "What the photograph shows goes with any story one chooses to invent", he says before calling attention to the broader variables at play within a photograph and includes the "thereness of the world". The background color of the pictures in my post tie them to a known thing that a few readers could identify. Through the medium of color, questions were raised and meaning was assigned, then shared and discussed.

Without a story, Berger continues, there is no meaning. Therefore, the very raising of the question of the location from which the picture was taken led to investigation into this person's background which, did reveal he had broken the law in the past. What then do the words begin to mean when the images lead to a different set of questions--instead of where is this person? discussion focused on what has this person done to get themselves in this situation?

How do our connections to color and environment affect a reader's ability to focus on the headings or the author's suggestion of the focus?

How does this affect interest and urgency in the story or it's call to action? While the skin color of the individuals in the photos can be included in this discussion it is for me, a secondary (though integral!) issue within this post. Because here, the meaning associated with the background overshadows what seems to be most clearly in focus. Looking at Berger's photographic choices and lableing of "peasants" while pulling in what he attributes to be its primary raw materials: Light and time--the dark shawdowy pictures of especially the children give treatment to the meaning I associated with the plight of the individuals shown here.

Number of the Beast

I know this is late, but I posted to the wrong part of the blog last week and had trouble uploading my pic. This is a copy of my post, with image intact (yay!). Before my trouble posting, I had hard time choosing an image to post. I was debating between several different artists I like, but Larkin's post kind of cracked me up. It reminded me of the Iron Maiden album Powerslave, with all the Egyptian iconography. For this assignment, I ended up going with Number of the Beast, which I like a little better than Powerslave, both visually and rhetorically.

I am currently reading Jeff Chang's 2005 book on the history of hip-hop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, for an art history class on the impact of hip-hop culture on contemporary art. Chang talks about the interplay of graffiti, fashion, dance, film, and music creating a rich, multisensory, public image of hip-hop culture. This gave me a conceptual framework for thinking about the visual rhetoric of 80s heavy metal in general and Iron Maiden in particular.

I mainly like the Number of the Beast cover because it’s like the ultimate “fuck you” to suburban parents and the entire White, middle-class, conformist, Christian establishment. Eddie, the skeletal demon and Maiden mascot, towers over Satan in a stance that both threatens (parents and other conservatives) and beckons (teenaged metal-heads). But then, have any of you listened to this album (or any classic Iron Maiden) recently? I was in Decent Pizza a few weeks ago and heard the entire Piece of Mind album by Iron Maiden and was really surprised at how tame, and even pretty, it sounded. The music is melodic and sophisticated, and the lyrics are literary and smart. The music it isn’t even remotely as scary as Maiden’s album covers would have us believe. So my questions about the Number of the Beast album cover are: Does the disparity between the aesthetics of the music and the image of the band conveyed by the album cover result from my contemporary listening context (25 years later)? Or did it always exist to a certain extent? If the latter (which to me seems more interesting to think about) what does that say about the 80s metal fan and about Iron Maiden?

Quotes!

Looking forward to your quotes . . . .

fishes

I have to admit that I wrestled with selecting an image for this assignment...probably because I was conflating our “Document the Decade” assignment with this one. However, that being said, I selected a “nature” picture. I think this image is interesting for several reasons. Depending on a person's knowledge of fish breeding habits, this might appear, at first glance, to be a mouth brooder with a “boomerang child;” however, fish aren't that forgiving and there is no returning to Mom's. A closer look might reveal the difference in the facial structures of the fish suggesting that they are different species. Likewise the fingerling's position in the Pike's mouth, gullet actually, also suggests something different is happening here. As a fisherman, this picture reminds of a time I was ice fishing with my father, grandfather, brother and assorted cousins and friends...after all, ice fishing is a social event as much as a sport. In one of the most amazing hunting or fishing events I've witnessed, I caught a 14” pickerel with a 7” perch in its belly. The perch's tail was still visible is the pickerel's mouth and I caught it using a 3-4” shiner (a bait fish)! FYI -- Pickerel are members of the Pike family, freshwater eating machines, think barracuda or piranha.

This picture was taken at an aquarium in Alaska during an effort by the Alaska Fish & Wildlife Division to eradicate illegally introduced Northern Pike from Salmon and Trout streams which makes the image interesting on several levels. First, in one sense it was a “staged” event. The pike and fingerling trout were placed in the aquarium together. However, then nature needed to take over and when it did, I'm reasonably sure that this image wasn't the intended outcome. In spite of this, the picture does illustrate the dangers of introducing wildlife in areas where the species isn't native. At the same time, I see metaphors for Empire and Capitalism lurking just beneath the surface. The pike is heading towards the viewer with its mouth semi-open. The pike is also apparently a youth fish because its teeth aren't fully developed. In fact, the teeth are 2 nub on the roof of the pike's mouth giving the fish a somewhat vampiresque appearance. At the same time, the fingerling trout has a sort of frown-like facial expression/appearance...an “Oh No! Save me Mr. Bill!” moment.

So I wonder who the audience for this display is...clearly, the trout and salmon fishermen aren't going to be introducing pike into their favorite salmon and trout fishing holes. But if the salmon and trout stock are depleted, I can picture the average joe/josephine dropping a fish or tow into a “barren” river or stream so that s/he can have a little action when they go fishing.

The irony of the Alaskan Fish and Wildlife Division launching a campaign to remove the pike from areas where it isn't native mirrors the Europeans' attempts to remove the indigenous people from the their (the indigenous people) homelands because the white men wanted the property isn't lost on me either. The raptorious nature of the Northern Pike reenacts the Europeans' swarming invasion of the New World. Likewise, images of capitalism can be drawn, the larger corporation swallowing the smaller one whole...

I think it's fantastic that a staged PR photo shoot resulted in an image that captures much more than a wildlife campaign, a save the Salmon and Trout drive...what color ribbons are we supposed to wear?

Emperor and Horus

I guess people just decided to post these on the main page, so I guess I'll follow the crowd. Don't want to make waves after all...

I chose an image that overlaps my own research. I write a great deal about cultural convergence in video games and this image is an important one for the narrative of Warhammer 40,000 which really interests me. The image represents the turning point in the internal universe of this particular story: a point at which the tragic villain betrays Goodness and irrevocably changes the course of the narrative(s). If this were a scene from Paradise Lost (and it can be thought of that way since Warhammer 40K is a clear remediation of Milton), this would be the scene in which Satan betrays God and is soon to be cast from Heaven.

I also like the picture because it's visually elaborate and baroque, overflowing with detail in the particular visual style cultivated by the publishers. It gives the eye a great deal to focus on even though the overall composition of the painting - the lines and positioning of figures - clearly guides the eye along a particular trajectory from the lower right to the upper left, establishing the narrative of the piece. The Emperor of Man (on the right) is confronting his first son, Horus (on the left) and their placement causes the gaze to follow from the Emperor to Horus across the big red eye in the middle (which, as per the story, symbolizes the moral and spiritual decay that stands figuratively and literally in this case between the two figures).

I have a couple problems with the image though, mostly because it troubles the morality tale being told. Horus is clearly higher and perhaps even taller than the Emperor, putting him at a rhetorical advantage where the Emperor ought to occupy the "high ground". This positioning also puts the Emperor as confronting Horus, stability confronting chaos - God confronting Satan - instead of the other way around. The over-eviling of Horus is also a problem for me (he's obviously the evil one, dark and covered in blood and decapitated heads), and for me this stylistic choice erases the tragedy of the narrative. Horus - and Milton's Satan - are compelling because their stories are partly tragic, and I don't see Milton's Satan as bright red and carrying a pitchfork any more than Horus ought to be bedecked in the trophies of his victims.

Those critiques notwithstanding, my preferences aren't set in stone. The moral and rhetorical ambiguity that the positioning of the figures lends them can be interpreted as following the story. For Milton, God's place is somewhat troubled and we are invited to entertain the logic of Satan's position. For Warhammer, the Emperor is even more ambiguous and distant than Milton's God - the Emperor occupies a troubled space between mortal and god - and there is always a question of his intentions, methods, and morality. The Emperor is "goodness" and "justice" are less clear than God's, so the image here implies that troubling.

The thing about this whole post, though, is that the image is and must be intertextual. It's part of a Convergence of media - video game, book, and painting - and requires interpretation in that respect. Only as a piece of Convergence Culture does the piece have useful narrative context.

Trang Bang, 1972

The girl is Phan Thi Kim Phuc. We all “know” her. Which I find amazing since I’ve never actually met her and this photo was taken about 10 years before I was even born. Yet, somehow, I know this little girl. Odd, no? This is why I like this photo; iconic images in general are incredibly interesting to me. More importantly, they raise some interesting questions, ones that piggy-back off of Berger.

Do photos need narratives (that provide contexts)? What would have happened if this photo was released without a caption or explanation? What if we did not know the war it came from; the girl’s name; the village; the year; what the cloud was behind her; why she looks in pain; whether she is safe after this is taken? This photo was cemented in American consciousness in 1972, and it continues to remain a (Pulitzer Prize winning) image of war. Would it have achieved that type of status without the narrative that was attached to it from the beginning? Furthermore, Berger talks about our tendency to create narrative when we are not given them. What happens when a 13 year old sees this photo, lacks the historical context, and perhaps sees it as a child in the Middle East at war? Does that change the photo? Does it essentially have the same message/meaning? Has the author, as Berger says, “chosen an instant which will persuade the public viewer to lend it an appropriate past and future?” Does it need to be about Vietnam and Phan Thi Kim Phuc for it to achieve its purpose? I think this is a perfect example of the notion that photos can provide “irrefutable evidence” but are weak in meaning. The power of this image is simply that it happened, this irrefutably happened to those children. Is the images power arrested to the Vietnam war specifically or not?

This iconic image also makes me question whether this is one of Berger’s “for ever” moments—one that exists across history, outside of time. We all have those images in our personal lives, as he notes, but aren’t iconic images proof of the social subjectivism he says is hard to find in our culture? Isn’t this a moment frozen in time, one that extends across history, and means is meaningful for large groups of people? Is that not a socially subjective “for ever” moment?

Finally, I cannot help but think about the photographer in this image. Huynh Cong Ut, or Nick, won a Pulitzer for this image. But, even as Berger says, aren’t there times when a person puts down his/her camera? Nick’s first reaction to seeing the pain of these children was to take a picture? That baffles me…. The narrative fills in the blanks, Nick poured water on Phan Thi Kim Phuc after this picture and took her to a nearby hospital where she spent 14 months recuperating from the burns. Her brother, also in the photo, also recovered but lost one of his eyes. As Hill and Helmers stress, the (mass) dissemination and (outraged) reception of this photo helped push for war reform in Vietnam; however, in the moment Nick could not have known that, all he knew was that these children were in extreme pain and he chose his camera lens first. I cannot reconcile which is more inhuman: the napalm or the fact that this image was taken.

Smooth Criminal?

This image is the work of famous (or perhaps infamous) graffiti artist Banksy. I enjoy Banksy’s work in general (I have his 2005 compilation Wall and Piece and my desktop wallpaper for over the past year has been one Banksy piece or another), but the Banksy I’ve posted here is the first one I ever saw. As such, this piece was not only my first exposure to Banksy but also the major impetus in my continual interest in his work.

My affinity for Banksy stems primarily from his unique style—no small feat for someone who works in a medium known for its uniqueness. His work certainly embodies many of the elements associated with standard graffiti art, but he’s also, as anyone who likes his work can attest, distinct. The poignant social and political commentary inherent in his work as well as the way he utilizes stencils (more on that later) and the space in which he creates his work set him apart from most of his contemporaries.

Perhaps most interesting about Banksy, however, is Banksy—the enigmatic persona, not the actual artist behind the pseudonym. At this point, Banksy’s work is so well known and received that a good number of people would be honored if he were to use their structure (house, building, etc.) for his work. But Banksy would never do that: part of his appeal is the very persona his art works to construct. He embraces fully the graffiti artist as outlaw mentality; as evinced in the Banksy I’ve posted, that mentality is often the inspiration behind his work. The maid in this piece is symbolic of those opposed to graffiti, the ones trying to hide it from the masses. Banksy is thus subverting the “graffiti equals criminality” argument through graffiti; he uses the medium to lampoon those opposed to the medium.

What’s perhaps more impressive is the lengths he’s gone to secure and maintain his persona. In order to conceal his identity and work amongst the shadows (heh: that makes him sound like Batman), he’s adopted stenciling; that is, he creates his stencils ahead of time so that the actual “painting” portion of his work is highly efficient, allowing him to create large pieces in a short amount of time. In a Bitzerian sense, it’s an extraordinary adaptation to the constraints in the rhetorical situation that constitutes his work.

Now: some questions. First, how much of a role does his persona—that is, his status and reputation as a graffiti artist—play in the way his audience understands and perceives his work? I brought up a similar point with the Lange photo: in other words, if we see a Banksy piece and are privy to Banksy the artist, then we most likely come to see his work through a different lens than if, say, we randomly stumbled upon his work and were oblivious to his prior work. In saying that, I’m not simply trying to claim that context matters—it obviously does. Rather, how much of a role does context play when the visual artifact is well known? I’m willing to buy the argument that we construct the context and thus the way we interpret and understand visuals we encounter for the first time, particularly visuals with no major cultural traction. However, doesn’t the context generated by fame, because it is so pervasive, trump our individual contexts?

Secondly, what role does the audience play in a Banksy piece? Or here’s another way of looking at it: is there an intended audience for his work? The perpetually public status of graffiti necessitates that he cannot control who sees his work. Does this limit him in any way or is this something he uses to his advantage?

Lastly, what is the extent to which location influences his work? I’ve never seen an actual Bansky piece, just pictures of his work. These two—the original and a picture of the original—engender a different viewing experience. That doesn’t mean I can’t still appreciate Banksy’s work through a removed viewing of it; rather, the viewing is just different. My question, then, is to what extent is it different? Moreover, with the original, where does the visual artifact end? Is it the stenciled image, the building as a whole, the block that contains the building? There’s also a context contained in the location that one isn’t privy to when looking at a still photo of the art; how much does that matter?