first efforts

Midweek mix

Smithsonian's Bigger Picture blog discusses a University of Illinois research project that's archiving the earliest video games.

Nina Berman fondly remembers Big Jesus at BAGNewsNotes.

Also at The BAG, Alan Chin photographs the oil spill with his usual amazing vision.

I just discovered Composing with Images, a lovely photoblog in which two photographers offer their individual takes on a different theme each week. They recently announced a new book series.

Last but not least, The Onion reports that President Obama's gone avant garde in his weekly video addresses. Watch out, Jenny Holzer!

Camera culture: Are there no viewers anymore?

The New York Times LENS blog has a nice essay today about the role the digital camera plays in our experiences of culture and place. Seth Mydans (son of FSA and LIFE magazine photographer Carl Mydans) describes an upcoming documentary called "Camera, Camera" which argues that "the world as a whole is being altered by the colonization of fragile cultures by camera-carrying travelers." Mydans offers the above photo as an example of the odd impulse to capture instead of experience. One of the commenters suggested this 2007 New Yorker cover as a nice example of the same idea.

If you follow the link to the Mydans essay, be sure to watch the film clip of a morning procession of Buddhist monks in Laos being photographed by tourists. It's creepy but yet totally familiar. On the one hand, Mydans and the filmmakers are simply pointing to the old problem Susan Sontag observed years ago: "The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own." But I do think there is something different lurking here, too. In the kinds of images Mydans points us to, production and reception collapse into one another.

What does a viewer look like anymore? Increasingly, it's someone with head bowed, checking out the tiny screen on the back of a camera.

image credit: Lydie France/EPA via The Guardian

Asclepias syriaca

Or common milkweed, to you and me. Our garden, 6.14.10.

What is this a picture of?

If you had to file this photograph in an archive and select keywords to describe it, what would you say? In this shot from the Library of Congress's Flickr photostream (selected more or less randomly, because I love her smile and her trumpet), we might start with "Rose Sanderson" printed at the top of the frame. Is Rose the smiling trumpeter? Her appearance in the center of the frame suggests so, but we can't know for sure without further investigation. And what of the other women? What is the occasion for gathering together with smiles and trumpet? And where exactly was the photo made? One of the banners seems to say "Votes for Women." So maybe this is some sort of suffrage parade or gathering, which puts the photo before 1920, but we don't know where, or exactly when. There appears to be a date scrawled on the right side, but it is difficult to read.

Then there's an entirely different way we might describe the photo: moving beyond the photograph's content to consider its status as an object. What sort of camera made it? What does the negative look like? What is its size?  

The question, "What is this a picture of?" is never easy to answer. I have written about this in the context of my work as a researcher in photographic archives. But it's useful to get the archivists' take on things as well. The Bigger Picture blog from the Smithsonian offers a great post on how archivists use descriptive metadata to make it easier for folks like me to find what I'm looking for. Marguerite Roby walks us through the various choices archivists make as they seek to make visual information accessible to as many users as possible.

As for "Rose Sanderson," well, that may not even be her name. See here for how Flickr users have had fun working through the archival mysteries in this photo.

(Check out also a related Bigger Picture post from Roby, called "What Does a Photograph Archivist Do?")

Hands on art

If I ever do a book on presidents and White House art, this photo absolutely will be the cover. For a reading of this image in the context of oil spill rhetoric, see my guest post today at BAGNews.

image credit: Pete Souza/White House. "President Barack Obama straightens a painting in the Oval Office, May 10, 2010."

Updating Visual Politics

  

I'll be teaching my Visual Politics course again this fall. Although I have *lots* of other summer work to do before it's time to revise my syllabus (see here and here for ideas about how to manage one's dreams of summer productivity), I've begun accumulating materials to add to the next version of the course.

When the politics change, the visuals change. I have started past semesters with studies of the economic crisis, the election, and health care reform. A lot can happen between now and August, of course, but the story of the year is definitely the oil spill. These two pieces from LENS (the NYT photo blog) will orient the students to some visual conventions of depicting environmental crisis. We'll also examine the media phenomenon that is (was?) the live underwater video feed; let's hope it's not still gushing live in August.

One theme of the course is "visualizing and informing" - those visuals that depict information and visualize relationships via maps, charts, and diagrams. We spend some time with the work of Edward Tufte in this unit, reading his arguments against PowerPoint and using Colin Powell's ill-fated speech to the U.N. in 2003 as a case study. Recently I've found a couple of things to add to this unit: a New York Times story (and related links) on the U.S. military's ambivalence about PowerPoint and an NPR feature on Edward Tufte aired just this past weekend. Tufte's now consulting with the federal government on data visualization; some of his work can be seen at recovery.gov.

Lastly, I'm always interested in accumulating more appropriations of popular images we study throughout the semester, like the Obama HOPE poster. The cat above is struggling with the injustice of clay cat litter, while this guy is struggling with the injustice of being fired, getting a lot of money in severance, and getting a new TV show. Hope, indeed.

Leaving a footprint

This widely circulated photo effectively condenses three elements of the now painfully familiar visual rhetoric of the environmental disaster that is the BP oil spill. There's the oil, of course, here a reddish-brown splotch literally tarring the sand of an Alabama beach and oozing in directions difficult to predict. There's the wildlife, illustrated here in the form of a hermit crab dangerously close to the oil. Is the shell occupied or has its vulnerable and desperate resident skedaddled to safer terrain? Hard to know. Finally, there's the footprint. We might find its implication that humans are to blame as bordering on the cliche, but look carefully and you'll see the deep impression of a lug-soled boot, heel dug firm into the sand. That footprint moves beyond blame to emphasize that there's so, so much work to be done.

Image credit: AP/John David Mercer (Press-Register), "A hermit crab and oil that washed ashore along the Gulf of Mexico coastline of Dauphin Island, Ala. are seen inside a boot print Tuesday June 1, 2010."

The edible president

A few years ago we discussed presidents and food on this blog. Readers contributed photographs of presidents with food and, memorably, one depiction of a president as food:

   

But this? Um, not exactly what I had in mind:

Here's the explanation.