Monday, November 22, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
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?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
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.
Abu Grabe and Sontag Revisited
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."
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."
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
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.
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