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The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.
... visibly deformed or diseased patients but could not penetrate the opaque body; it simultaneously "enfreaked" and abjectified disabled subjects through a visual language that, though didactic, was influenced by social attitudes and cultural stigmas (Barnett, 2014;Siebers, 2010). By contrast, the image rendered through mechanical eyes is considered infallible, as the photograph is supposed to capture without bias and is presumed objective, authentic, and evidential (Tagg, 1988;Crary, 1996). ...
... 61). According to Tagg (1988), the status of photography as a technology varies with the power relations that invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. ...
... In scientific fields, mechanized observers could replace fatigable, distractible human observers, expressing the triumph of reliability and self-discipline over the foibles of the flesh (Daston & Galison, 1992, p. 83). Although spirit photographs have cast suspicion on the neutrality of the photographic image, it retained an aura of objectivity, giving equal emphasis to everything in its frame whereas artists could foreground or deemphasize parts of a scene or dissection (Tagg, 1988;Daston & Galison, 1992;Baer, 2005). The photograph could furnish incontrovertible evidence of a moment in time to the point that, within three decades of its invention, the technology was used for: ...
This project theorizes relationships among discourses around the ailing body, biomedical technologies intended to render visible chronic pain, and the compulsory able-bodymindedness of academic culture and its writing conventions. Through analysis of discursive artifacts, such as imaging reports, pharmaceutical rhetoric, self-monitoring technologies, and academic interchange, I show how techniques and institutions converge to bring the scholar-in-pain under the biomedical and academic gaze. From pain questionnaires to requirements within the academy, institutions and standards seek to quantify pain in ways that minimize chronicity, contingency, and idiosyncrasy to craft acceptable, visible experiences of pain and its embodiment; chronically pained subjects must conform to these understandings in order to be believed. In this project, I analyze and examine my analysis of my pain as both a patient and a scholar to de-individuate the singular experience of chronic pain and recover what is desirable and resistive about the ontology of fibromyalgia. I consider how meanings are made around a queer Eelam Tamil fibromyalgic woman scholar’s bodymind in biomedical and academic settings in order to excavate broader cultural relationships among chronic pain, ocularcentrism, Euro-Western and Tamil sensory hierarchies, and decolonial ways of knowing.
... According to Tagg (1993), poses aid in denaturalizing iconographic codes of the time (p. 35). ...
... Thus, viewers can hypothesize a tension between the producer and the subject of the picture. This tension is made clear in the shoulder position of Douglass, not facing completely sideways but also not facing upfront and is supported by Tagg's (1993) statement on heads and shoulders as the parts of our bodies which imply truth (p. 35). ...
Historically, tools of ocularity have enabled the racialization of marginalized individuals through invisibility. During the antebellum period, these tools were coopted to naturalize discriminatory beliefs without agency from the photographed subjects. Douglass’ portrait taken by Samuel Miller showcases the subversiveness of his use of the daguerreotype to uncover race relations in antebellum America. Douglass knowingly sat for the photograph as an effort to move away from the visual scrutiny Black individuals faced. This is exemplified in the more than 160 pictures he sat for throughout his lifetime. The picture in possession by the Art Institute of Chicago showcases Douglass agency and right to see and look back. A picture that redefined Blackness by breaking through the racial categories that visually maintained white supremacy as hegemonic. This artifact is also a symbol of the overwhelming number of African American contributions in visual culture that are unfortunately still overlooked by scholars. Whether it is as sitters, daguerreotypists, gallery owners, etc.; visual culture was profoundly impacted by Black Americans during the 19th century. For instance, Ball, who was both a Daguerrean gallery owner and a daguerreotyper was featured in Frederick Douglass’ paper, highlighting the importance of self-representation and self-possession. Moreover, the mystification of pictures that uncovered race relations in America is disputed. To regard photography that depicts oppression as artistry is contentious. However, in this analysis, I propose a way to highlight the visualization of invisible gazes that have been taken away the right to look back.
... Nevertheless, the creation of illusion through representative media such as photography or painting is never ideologically neutral. Photography theory in the 1980s and '90s usefully outlined the insidious power dynamics at play and the scientism that had long informed the interpretation and use of photography (Bolton, 1989;Sekula, 1986;Tagg, 1993). Likewise, as John Berger argues, in the turn toward illusionistic representation in the use of oil painting in western art, the values of property and ownership are communicated through the detailed depiction of finery and material wealth (Berger, 2008: 83-90). ...
The release of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in 2022, including DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, has opened up new avenues to producing images. This new paradigm has implications for ideas of vision, illusion, and representation. Computer vision research has long used photographic images as a way to enable machines to see. Generative AI, on the other hand, uses data and techniques from computer vision to create images. This is possible thanks to the use of artificial neural networks that process vast datasets of training images, many of which are photographs, and the text associated with them. This article considers the relationship between image creation, illusion, and the notion of space in multimodal models. The photographic form of AI-generated images, coupled with a lack of understanding or experience of space undergirding their creation, reveals the illusion and artifice that is part of all photography.
... The critique against satellite vision is reminiscent of that which has been raised against panopticism in other contexts. Scholars invoke the metaphor of the panopticon when taking issue with claims on absolute vision, both with respect to satellites (Herscher, 2014;Poster, 1990;Warf, 2012) and other forms of representation (Tagg, 1988). To draw on Haraway's (1988) influential statement, attempts to see everything from nowhere are proven to always be partial views from somewhere. ...
This article focuses on a series of connections between space infrastructures and environments in northern Sweden. Swedish space professionals often highlight the centrality of outer space for contemporary imaginaries about the planet as an interconnected whole. At the same time, the country's sounding rocket range outside the city of Kiruna relies on deep-seated constructions of the subarctic environment as empty wilderness. With the ongoing development of small satellite launch capability, the surrounding landscape needs to be sustained as an impact area, with the consequence that Sámi land practices are increasingly pushed to the sidelines. By turning to reindeer herders' own uses of satellite technology, I delineate an oligoptic-satellitarian environment that runs athwart panopticonic understandings of satellite vision. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, the herders bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations in order to challenge conceptions of the landscape as empty and exploitable. While showing that space activities in Sweden fold into and reproduce colonial histories, the article also argues that space infrastructures contain the potential for their own reconfiguration by eliciting the other worlds that are already being performed from within dominant socio-technical regimes.
... Therefore, journalistic photography has a direct relationship with its carrier medium, as well as with the texts that "fix" it to certain meanings, be it the body of the news, the titles, or the caption of the image. Journalistic photography not only represents a type of representation but also carries the title of record and proof of reality for many decades of the 20th century, and even up to the present day, it carries the title of record and proof of reality (Tagg 2021). ...
In this article, we propose a methodological reflection based on the work with photographs of youth published in print media in Chile during the 20th century. We use our proposal for qualitative analysis, which includes intentional work with visual culture, the creation of our own archives, and the development of tools for individual and group analysis of photographs. We propose two specific strategies for the analysis of photographs: the first is “layered analysis”, and the second is “group or panel analysis”, which allows for linking images, culture, and youth. We trust that this methodological reflection will contribute to the study of youth and stimulate debate in the field of study itself.
... While desiring to harness the democratizing potential of this new medium to challenge power, they also sought to elevate photography into an art form, thereby "de-democratized it" through the celebration of authorship and mastery." (Sekula 1975;Tagg 1988;Watney 1982). ...
The article critically analyzes how contemporary image practices involving generative artificial intelligence are entangled with processes of democratization. We demonstrate and discuss how generative artificial intelligence images raise questions of democratization and citizenship in terms of access, skills, validation, truths, and diversity. First, the article establishes a theoretical framework, which includes theory on democratization and aesthetics and lays the foundations for the analytical concepts of ‘formative’ and ‘generative’ visual citizenship. Next, we argue for the use of explorative and collaborative methods to investigate contemporary image practice, before analyzing the central part of our investigation, which takes the form of four collaborative workshops conducted in 2023 with external partners in different domains (the art scene, art therapy, education, and the news media). After analyzing insights from these workshops, the article significantly nuances how visual citizenship is at work in different manners depending on the different concrete image practices using generative artificial intelligence. Finally, we conclude that an aesthetic perspective offers valuable insights into foundational aspects of belonging to contemporary visual communities.
... Since the advent of photography technologies in the mid 19 th century, visual representations have also gained significance as a medium across multiple disciplines and industries. It has been used as a tool of power and a method for surveillance and control (Hall, 1997;Tagg, 1988). It has also become a significant medium for collective and individual memory preservation (Barthes, 1981), for social identity constructions (Forrester, 2000), and for disseminating news through photojournalism and shaping people's attitudes and emotions in relation to world happenings (Sontag, 1997). ...
The theory of social representations has offered a significant and nuanced theoretical framework to gather and interpret knowledge across a wide range of subjects and mediums in order to discuss how different social and material contexts are perceived for the purpose of providing a meaningful foundation to a given reality. The theory has been critiqued and expanded hugely to provide a rich source of intellectual enquiry within social psychology and beyond. However, one area that has received scant attention, is the significance of graphic imagery as a source of data from which to explore social representations within the public consciousness. As imagery in media and social media has become an extension of perceptions of a given social reality, this special issue aims to fill this gap to explore how the power of the image can reflect the diffusion of social representations across our often politicised social and cultural worlds.
... Another view is that of John Tagg, again in relation to photography, but again relevant to phonographic forms: "The indexical nature of the photograph -the causative link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign -is (therefore) highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at the level of meaning". 11 Artists thrive on exploring the complexity of the link between referent and sign. The lack of guarantee of meaning is not the same as no meaning at all. ...
... This overestimation-reflecting photography's ostensible documentary potentialities, its mechanical way of reproduction and the long history of the use of photographs as evidence in all sorts of circumstances-tells us less about photography than about our longing for some degree of certainty and assurance. It is often ignored that there is no necessary and direct connection between a photograph and what John Tagg (1988: 2) calls "prior reality." Thus, we believe in photography's truthvalue mainly because we want to believe in it. ...
In this essay it is argued that northern photography can serve as an epistemological triangle both combining different layers of experiences and memories with one another—experience in the north, experience as inhabitants of the north and experience as such—and connecting photographers, subjects of photography and viewers with one another. The essay discusses selected photographs of northern indigenous people and landscapes—and the approaches underlying them—in terms of what is here deemed key concepts in social research including northern studies: experience and memory. Owing to the surplus of meaning that images inevitably carry with them and their irreducibility to one meaning, photographic images, it is argued, contribute to what Sherrill Grace has called the north’s “resistance to measure and closure.” Images may help the beholder to acknowledge that different groups of people may have different memories of what only seems to be the same history. A brief discussion of the work of Jorma Puranen, Tiina Itkonen and Antero Takala substantiates these claims.
... Together with cartography, historiography and travel journals, photography also played a role in representing those living at the edges of capitalist and colonialist society as stereotyped and otherised entities. The almost immediate acquisition of the new medium by French and British institutions coincided with the foundation of scientific societies, employing it as an instrument to provide evidence of their theories; in addition, it perfectly served the positivist purpose of typifying and cataloguing reality (Tagg 1988;Marien 2002). Such biased parameters influenced colonial photography (see Figures 1 and 2), which emphasized the subject's anatomic features or depicted them standing half-naked in front of timeless utopic scenarios (cf. ...
This paper aims to analyze the relationship between writing, photography and the representation of otherness in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and The Cruise of the Snark (1911), the only works illustrated by his own photographs. The first is the report of a six-weeks stay in the East End of London, where he lived with the poor and documented their condition; the second retraces a boat trip in the South Pacific Islands, where he witnessed the effects of colonialism. The purpose is to shed light on London’s unconventional approach towards otherness, as well as on the role of intermediality in these works, ascribable to the genre of phototexts. In stark contrast to the common Western representation of poor and non-white people, the author re-writes their stories in a hybrid transposition on the edge between words and images.
... Yet, photographs still seem to make self-evident truth claims. As visual studies scholars have described, the realism of documentary photography is "a core attribute that established its privileged claim on truth, facticity, and intelligibility" linked to the medium's evidentiary, typifi ed, and mimetic dimensions (Feldman 1997: 24;Tagg 1993). Take, for example, another iconic image of the suffering child. ...
... Therefore, a primary understanding of 'objective truth' is essential because perceptions starts from sensory organs but we interpret these perceptions using knowledge attained through cognitive processes retained by means of memory, cues or prompts (R. Sekuler; R. Blake). In other words, a photograph may be seen as a system of signs with multiple concrete and constructed interpretations (Tagg, 1988). Barthes suggests that on one hand, a newspaper photograph is akin to an object subjected to professional media treatment. ...
Photography, as a medium, is frequently manipulated by users for propagandistic purposes or intentionally altered through image-editing software to present a modified version of events. The advent of technologies that produce photorealistic A.I. generated images reignites the conundrum surrounding ‘authenticity’ in photo documentaries. Despite documentary photography being a familiar genre, there are scarcely any comparative surveys that address the methods adopted by different documentary photographers. A review of photo documentary works reveals inadequacies in the process of documenting communities. This review also highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. By extracting recurring critical components and positive attributes found among the photographers in the survey, a methodology matrix is created to guide future documentary works relating to communities. In this essay, I present a method to mediate between the reflexive inclination of the photographer in producing documentary works and the participants’ own ‘social desirability bias’ when providing information to investigators. With the Tenggerese community as my project participants, I implemented a post-reflexive co-audit model where stakeholders in a documentary project participate and co-produce in a more level playing field that reinforces the need to deepen the accountability to produce documentary work with solid ‘photocredibility’.
... A model of "objective" documentary photography as practiced by mid-20 th century documentary photographers is being challenged as a transparent representation of social "truth" (Soutter, 2018b). Critiques of documentary representation that emerged in 1980s writings by Martha Rosler (1981) or John Tagg (1988) and that found their visual expression in the conceptual anti-documentary of artists like Alfredo Jaar or Allan Sekula are now almost universally accepted. The lived experience and embodied vision of photographers local to their subject matter provides an antidote to the unwelcome power dynamics of Western photojournalists documenting suffering in developing countries (Diwan, 2020). ...
This essay reflects on the conditions of contemporary art photography as a global phenomenon with an expanding international network of production, dissemination and discourse.
... Desde el auge de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación, la práctica social fotográfica se ha transformado rápidamente. Ha pasado de estar principalmente centrada hacia el registro documental de la vida cotidiana, a ser un medio sólido de comunicación (Tagg, 2002;Gómez, 2012;Wells, 2015;Bate, 2016). Basado en la noción de audiencias bien definidas y privadas, los propósitos comunicacionales detrás de los artefactos visuales exhibidos durante la convalecencia y el aislamiento representan un ángulo del "yo" que no sería usualmente proyectado en las plataformas abiertas de internet. ...
En el marco de la investigación “Violencia estructural y COVID-19”, se examinó la presentación fotográfica de las personas en situación de vulnerabilidad por aislamiento y recuperación de la enfermedad. El uso de fotografías en las redes sociales de internet no sustituye a los modos de interacción social, sino que los amplía. En este contexto, las plataformas sociales de mensajería privada ofrecen un canal a través del cual las personas se presentan más cómodamente ante sus audiencias. Las imágenes examinadas acompañan a una entrevista semiestructurada que sirvió para recuperar la experiencia sanitaria de los participantes. Las preguntas relacionadas con las fotografías exploraron: (a) presencia en las redes sociales en internet, (b) comportamientos sobre contenido visual, (c) medios de comunicación utilizados durante el aislamiento u hospitalización y (d) autointerpretaciones de artefactos visuales compartidos durante la enfermedad. Sobre la práctica del autorretrato, se detectó un equilibrio entre las personas que hicieron uso de la fotografía para presentarse ante sus seres queridos y demás conocidos, y las personas que no hicieron uso de la fotografía durante el proceso de hospitalización. Al reencontrarse con sus fotografías, surgieron varios sentimientos que sugieren felicidad luego de la recuperación. Además, las personas recuerdan claramente cómo se sentían al momento de hacerse los autorretratos examinados. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 77, No. 770, 2022 : 99-114.
... Photography has clearly been burdened by the demands placed upon it to function as a medium of evidence: photography is very rarely an image of itself, but rather is an instrument towards something other. John Tagg (1988) argued that photography has no history or identity belonging to itself. Instead, photography's history is dispersed across the many fields, agencies and uses that instrumentalise photography: 'Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. ...
Photography evidences presence, but what does it present? This article explores the notion of magic in photography through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘haecceity’, Jacques Derrida’s logic of the ‘supplement’ and Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘inhuman’. The sections ‘The Zone of Photography’, ‘Ghosts in/of the Machine’, ‘The Crypt and Encryption’, ‘Affect-Event-Haecceity’ and ‘Magic, Consumerism, Desire’ consider how photography provides a ‘zone’ that encrypts the desires of its photographer and viewer. A photograph, in its various forms and appearances, from scientific instrument to personal documentation, bears our need and desire to be affected. The photographic zone can connect with the anxiety, fear, grief, and ha ppiness that are latent within the irrationality of its viewer. The photography is never past as it continually unfolds into, and is entangled with, the fabric of the present. Through consideration of photography we will consider how magic does not happen to people but people happen to magic. We desire magic to appear.
... This gave photographs evidential objectivity in the court of law over, for instance, oral testimony. Moreover, Tagg (2002) writes of the visual realism of criminal and phrenological photography as identified with penological and disciplinary regimes; similarly, Rabinbach (1992) discusses scientific kinesthetic photography as utilized through the Fordist labor discipline, and other scholarship addresses the role of photography in relation to visual realism in governmental surveillance of prisons and warfare (Appadurai, 1996;Feldman, 2000). This captures the essence of prison representations and documentations. ...
During an armed security operation on Lebanon’s most notorious prison, an image emerges from the POV of a prisoner. Capturing the military vehicles and the prison bars obstructing his vision, a prisoner snatches a photograph through his illicitly smuggled cellphone camera. In this article, I follow the events of Lebanese authorities’ intervention on Roumieh Central Prison’s Bloc B and collect a sample of images and videos produced and circulated by prisoners as the operation was taking place. By examining the frame, composition, POV, sound, and montage of such amateur fragmentary cellphone recordings, I note two major modes of framing adopted by prisoners; one frames outside the bars and the second frames inside. I contextualize such modes of framing as ‘counter-shots’ in relation to the state’s media strategies of legitimizing its repressive actions and I argue that prisoners utilize smuggled media technologies, such as the cellphone and its camera, as a response to the state’s performative acts of sovereignty. Prisoners operationalize the frame and the POV to create a ‘counter’ way of seeing and documenting the events on Bloc B. Hence, prison cellphone recordings reflect not only what is portrayed inside their frames, but also their means of production. Through the framework of media as practice and the notion of media witnessing, I argue that the illicitly produced modes of framing reflect a practice of media production based around the smuggling of media technologies into the prison. Through such a practice, prisoners produce images and videos to represent and document their lived experiences, relay testimonies, and make the audience bear witness to the horrific and precarious conditions of incarceration; hence, engaging in a practice of documentation from the prison.
... The cases against the officers involved in King's beating and Floyd's murder are acute reminders how, with wide latitude, video can be used differently by different legal parties who talk about the evidence and call on experts to clarify its meaning all the while seemingly letting the video speak for itself. In other words, despite the rhetoric of naïve realism, video's varied status as evidence continues to depend on the individuals and practices that render it meaningful in court (e.g., Bock, 2021;Ristovska, 2021;Tagg, 1988). At the same time, the disparate assessment of video by courts can lead to inconsistent renderings of justice that may undermine the legal process. ...
This paper examines the unregulated approach to video evidence in U.S. courts. It provides an overview of three key factors that contribute to the inconsistent treatment of video as evidence: the shifting and uncertain categories under which video is admitted as evidence, the discrepancies in how video is perceived and interpreted, and the lack of widespread legal training in visual literacy. Together, these factors exacerbate the challenges that visual perception and interpretation pose in court, as illustrated by the analysis of the varied use of video by district and appellate courts at summary judgment in McDowell v. Sherrer, a case involving an Eight Amendment excessive force claim. By discussing these challenges, the paper argues for the necessity of archival legal standards, which could facilitate research into uniform guidance and applications for treating video as evidence. Otherwise, civil rights and human rights may be disparately recognized and upheld.
This chapter discusses the significance of this book by bridging ongoing debates across digital media, visual communication, and cultural studies. It discusses the intersection of these fields, emphasising the need to consider sociocultural perspectives when integrating new technologies, such as drones, into society. This introduction is pivotal in setting the theoretical framework, aiding readers in tracing the development of the book’s arguments. By exploring key concepts of mobility (Sheller & Urry, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38(2), 207–226. 2006) and mediation (Kember, S., & Zylinska, J., Life after new media: Mediation as a vital process. MIT Press, 2012), the chapter explores how mobile technologies contribute to reshaping visual media’s creation and perception in the contemporary digital landscape. Building on Pink’s (Doing visual ethnography. SAGE Publications, 2021) assertion that the analysis of visual objects must be contextualised, the discussion extends to theories of vision (Berger, J, Ways of seeing: Based on the BBC television series with John Berger; a book made. British Broadcasting Corp, 1997; Crary, J., Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth century (Nachdr.). MIT Press, 1990; Sturken, M., & Cartwright, L., Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2001). It focuses on the practices of looking and seeing, particularly how drones modify visual experiences and embed these within sociocultural practices. Furthermore, the chapter draws on the extensive literature on visual communication to explore the intricate relationships between visuals, vision, and associated practices (Mirzoeff, An introduction to visual culture (2nd ed.). Routledge, 2009; Mitchell, W. J. T., Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. University of Chicago Press, 1994, Mitchell, W. J. T., What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. University of Chicago Press, 2005). This comprehensive theoretical grounding helps readers navigate the complex interactions between technological advancements and cultural perceptions throughout the book.
This chapter questions the methodological challenges that the practice-based research has posed and explains the creative process that supported the development of the photographic work. The theoretical background led me to reflect on practical and creative solutions when producing portraits, and a series of key points about this visual journey is developed. The challenges of the representation of a group of people with individual photographic portraits are discussed. The chapter underlines how previous work and the understanding of a creative process can be precursory of later research and why the inclusion of the landscape versus maintaining a neutral background has links with paintings from the Italian Renaissance.
The article following text examines various kinds of visual representations of poverty. Its first part presents historical background and shortly reminds of the most representative and well-known photo-actions, like Farm Security Administration, documentary projects by Jacob A. Riis and Lewis W. Hine, and some others. In the second part the author concentrates on more contemporary photographers and different aspects of their work (for instance, S. Salgado, D. McCullin, J. Holdt). His theoretical assumption is based on conviction that there are no neutral and disinterested images. Beyond every single photo one may find a complicated net of transactions, private and public interests, tensions between channels of images distribution (official and non-official circulations of the photos). Images presenting the poor, homeless, excluded, dysfunctional people very often are ordered by state agendas, institutions of social control, police and many others institutions of power. Photographical evidence of poverty is always ideologically influenced and it always serves a cause (fight for social changes, controlling some groups, exploration of visual attractiveness of poverty). The final conclusion is that in many cases such images least of all serve the poor and excluded.
Photography’s definition as a distinctive medium has often been contested, but seems increasingly challenged in foundational terms in the 21st century. This article will explore photography’s rather unsettled relation to media and media theory by drawing on the writings of Vilém Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and Bernard Stiegler, who have all — albeit in different ways — positioned the emergence of photography in the 19th century as a signal event in the history of media. Photography marks the point at which cultures long organized around ‘writing’ began to cede ground to cultures in which ‘technological images’ play a growing role. In the 21st century it has become increasingly common to ask whether photography remains faithful to its past or has become something else. My approach here is slightly different: what does the historical transformation of photography tell us about how we understand ‘media’ in the present?
A presente pesquisa tem como tema estampas presentes nas campanhas da marca Van Cleve, uma marca de roupas e acessórios de Blumenau, com foco em estampas exclusivas que prezam pela originalidade em suas criações. O principal objetivo desta monografia é analisar, por meio da semiótica, as postagens do Instagram da marca de moda Van Cleve. Enquanto os objetivos específicos consistem em analisar as mensagens plásticas das imagens selecionadas, categorizar as mensagens icônicas das respectivas selecionadas; estruturar as mensagens linguísticas das imagens e refletir sobre as imagens de moda da marca Van Cleve. A metodologia deste trabalho se refere a uma pesquisa descritiva de abordagem qualitativa que utiliza a semiótica aplicada como técnica de análise, permitindo uma investigação aprofundada das mensagens presentes nas imagens, considerando os elementos plásticos, icônicos e linguísticos. Foram analisadas dez fotografias do Instagram da marca entre os períodos dia 8 de fevereiro ao dia 21 de abril de 2023. Com o principal resultado alcançado podemos considerar que as postagens do Instagram da marca de moda Van Cleve apresentam um storytelling coeso com as coleções, por meio de elementos que fazem parte do tema.
The second chapter examines the integration of the institutional technologies of film and law, specifically, the socialist realist documentary The Great Land Reform and the Land Reform Law, to consolidate socialism into a new ‘régime of truth’ during the PRC’s revolutionary era. Photographs and film footage have been admitted as evidence to testify the factual truth of a past event in a court of law. The logical expository structure of socialist realism promoted the documentary to stand as “objective truth” by imparting the image with evidentiary force. The propaganda film The Great Land Reform adopted successive filters including direct address, political dichotomisation between the farmers who were framed as worthy victims and the landlords categorised as the enemy class, dramatic music accompaniment and evidentiary editing. The filtering strategies functioning as rhetorical proofs support the development of a linear narrative arc with a clear beginning, climax and resolution. Socialist realism was successfully deployed to create consensus and legitimise the progressive land reform policy by operating in the cause-and-effect temporality of evidence verité. Feudalism representing the past has been dismantled, and the oppressed population has been liberated towards a utopic future.
The Library of Congress (LOC) is an inherently political institution with immense reach. With 151.6 million visits and 520.3 million page views in 2022, its digital collections put the LOC’s repository of materials in the hands of users around the world, informing the kinds of narratives we tell about our past for purposes of the present. While more accessible, these collections are not always appropriately or transparently contextualized, creating significant barriers to access and often perpetuating biased or offensive language and attitudes. This matter stems from principles of provenance and metadata schemas, standards that govern how context is preserved and made available. As scholars working with digital information and literacy argue, the ubiquity of attributing authority to web-based information makes nuanced, accurate, and accessible context for digital collections increasingly necessary. Shortcomings in contemporary provenance and metadata practice are even sharper in the case of image and graphic narrative collections since prevailing descriptive standards were not designed with visual content in mind. These intersecting and at times contradictory concerns demonstrate both the complicated tension between provenance’s failures and its apparent necessity, and the ways it continues to affect applications of metadata. Exemplifying these complexities, we discuss two LOC case studies: the Webcomics Web Archive and Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. Illustrating the constraints of provenance and its circulation in metadata, these collections highlight the accessibility and equity issues that particularly impact visual materials.
Este artículo aborda la tercera novela de Miguel Ángel Hernández, El dolor de los demás (2018), con el objetivo de analizar diferentes decisiones formales tomadas por el autor, también narrador y protagonista del relato, que le permiten llegar a una serie de conclusiones relevantes acerca del propio proceso de investigación que acomete y sobre el modo más pertinente de afrontar un evento traumático y plasmar el pasado por escrito. Para este propósito se emplea una metodología híbrida, y se estudia cómo Hernández alterna un doble nivel discursivo —desde el pasado recordado hasta el presente en que se informa sobre la investigación— y reflexiona sobre la ficción; el decisivo rol que juegan las imágenes en el texto; o la importancia de temáticas como la memoria o el duelo.
O texto analisa informações sobre os trabalhadores vinculados aos curtumes da cidade de Pelotas nas décadas de 1930 e 1940, registradas nas solicitações de carteira profissional e nas demandas reivindicadas nos processos da Justiça do Trabalho. Nos pedidos das carteiras são obtidos detalhes pessoais e profissionais, além de uma fotografia 3x4, enquanto nos processos são observadas as peculiaridades do trabalho nos curtumes. A partir desses documentos, averiguou-se o perfil dos trabalhadores, as condições de trabalho e os motivos que os levaram a acionar judicialmente seus empregadores.
En las fotografías de la liberación del campo de concentración de Bergen-Belsen realizadas por la AFPU el desnudo tiene un carácter central a la hora de representar los “cuerpos degenerados” que habitan las instalaciones del horror. Esta centralidad no sólo es consecuencia de que la desnudez es consustancial a la naturaleza del deportado, sino también de que el desnudo se confirma como una herramienta adecuada para representar el pathos del sufrimiento en el contexto de las atrocidades. Particularmente, el desnudo muestra de manera excepcional el grado de degeneración/desexualización experimentado por los cuerpos expuestos a la violencia del nazismo.
“Seeing photographically” is an act of cultural memory. In an era of AI-generated images, screenshots, “disappearing” or “view once” photographs, and myriad other practices that challenge the definitional boundaries of photography, the phrase invokes past understandings of the medium’s sensory affordances, transferring them into a continually changing present. Focusing on a case study of the digital “rescue” of found film chemical photography, the article excavates cultural memory processes that relocate photographic seeing to digital arenas. The memory of “seeing photographically” does more, it claims, than preserve photography as a “zombie category” that disguises the reality of computational imagery. Rather, it helps construct and maintain a media ideology of what photography was and is, and of its continuing cultural, and especially existential, significance. Mobilizing worldviews, social values, and moral obligations associated with photography in the past, “seeing photographically” reanimates them in contemporary contexts of media ubiquity, intensified visibility, and existential anxiety, with profound ramifications.
In this chapter, I adopt an intermedial approach to examine the use of photography in several graphic illness narratives. I begin by tracing how the mixing of photography and cartooning introduces a dynamic interplay between the lived experience of illness and broad historical and technological contexts that intersect with that lived experience. Through close readings of several graphic illness narratives, I reach the conclusion that the use of photography in graphic illness narratives raises for consideration how knowledge of illness exists within an intermedial discursive network that also informs one’s personal experience of illness.
US-American artist Joanne Leonard’s book Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir generates a life-grounded sequencing of the photographic images she has created, each series marking the different temporalities of one woman’s life in its multiple voices. Images are juxtaposed to the artist’s reflective text on the political-subjective moments from which the images emerged, locating both her work and her retrospective writing in their changing conditions of existence shaped by place, class, gender, sexuality, desire, loss, and mourning. Pollock explores Leonard’s hybridity as interanimation with both memoir-writing by women and feminist theories of women’s autobiography as structurally ‘missing’ in a phallocentric culture, becoming a story only in a covenant of reading by other women that effectively ‘differences’ the genre of life-writing itself.
Weltabgewandter Sprachspieler oder »radikaler Realist«? Fremd- und Selbstzuschreibung gehen in Bezug auf den Autor Ror Wolf weit auseinander. Dies gründet auf einer nur scheinbaren Paradoxie: In Wolfs vielgestaltigem Werk vollzieht sich der Zugriff auf Wirklichkeit gerade im Modus der Sabotage, Unterbrechung, Irritation oder Verzerrung - kurz: im Modus der Störung. Ausgehend von der langen Prosa fragt Barbara Bausch nach möglichen Formen literarischer Referenzialität. Dabei konturiert sie Ror Wolfs experimentelle und zugleich engagierte Poetik des ästhetisch produktiven Störens als Kreuzungspunkt verschiedenster Suchbewegungen des Prosaschreibens in den 1950er bis 1980er Jahren.
When the US Army footage documenting the Korean victims of wartime sex slavery in the Imperial Japanese Army in China was discovered and released to the public in the summer of 2017, some South Korean academics questioned whether it should be understood as new evidence since it was believed that some of the subjects of the moving image had already been seen and located in photographs discovered previously in the 1990s. This reaction seemed diametrically opposed to that of the mainstream media (and social media), which excitedly praised the discovery of the “brand-new” evidential document depicting those moving women.
This article examines the politics of using film footage excavated from archives long after the original production of the film. Both types of reactions shown toward the “comfort women” footage shared the same attitude, which viewed the footage as a repository containing certain photographic-mechanical evidence to prove someone's existence in a scientific manner. Such a belief in the scientific nature of camera images bears a striking similarity with positivist historical approaches. Contrastingly, what Kracauer saw in film as a medium was rather the presence of things difficult to freeze and solidify. His concept of the “flow of life” describes an affinity with life (in the form of everyday life) that he theorized films possess but photographs do not. This article seeks a visual sociological method to explore film as a medium that embodies the reality of the subalterns and, if circumstances allow, speaks on their behalf.
Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre’s utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre’s overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists’ radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation—human to machine, human to animal, human to god—are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how?
Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre’s meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy—often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile—between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in “black and white” conservatism or in a “rainbow” of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power.
El siguiente artículo destaca la importancia epistemológica y metodológica de la sociología visual. Se explica el “hecho social-visual” como dispositivo teórico y técnico que funciona a través de la reflexividad, el sentido y la experiencia social de quienes tienen el “poder de ver” y en donde recaen sus miradas; en otras palabras, el mundo social y perceptivo de quienes son “vistos”. Se desentraña así un conocimiento sociológico de cómo se puede mirar y ser mirado. Recuperamos nuestras investigaciones, donde la fotografía funge como plataforma de interacción visual, la primera sobre el impacto de la reclusión en el ámbito doméstico y la segunda sobre la escenificación de jóvenes precarizados más allá de la porno-violencia.
The chapter addresses photographic portraits and self-portraits by the Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). In his experimental explorations of images of the face in diverse media—in photographic portraits, in painted portraiture as well as in verbal acts of portraiture—Witkiewicz provokes questions about the properties and values of the image of the face, especially when that image is multiplied, phased, and serialized. In the interwar period, Witkiewicz’s intense practice of photographing the face sets off new chains of significations, exposing for the viewer the face in fragments, the spectral face without contours, the tragic and grotesque face. As an astoundingly self-creative auto-photographer and portraitist, Witkiewicz is preeminent. Sceptical about emergent modernist movements, Witkiewicz creates faces which anticipate the use of extreme close-up techniques by acclaimed modernists, but also presage uses of the close-up as a technical precondition for a new vocabulary of facial expressions and facial erasure.KeywordsThe faceClose-upExcessPortraitureSelf-knowledgeS. I. Witkiewicz
The article proposes to look at the recently emerged online photographic archives in Eastern Europe as a form of digital commons. The bulk of the collected photographs in these archives are vernacular, family or amateur photographs, the sort which obstinately resists being included in the histories of photography. The online archives under scrutiny here, Fortepan in Hungary and Karta/CAS in Poland, disregard the established divisions between the photographic genres, allowing the reconfiguring of the hierarchies and values perpetuated by other archives and museum collections. Most significantly, by being accessible and relying on the contributions of its users, the online archives also forge a new public. The aim of this article is to investigate the affordances of these archives in constructing new photographic histories of the Cold War. Looking at selected photographs showing collective manifestations and street protests, the article will demonstrate the realignment of the private and the public in these archives.
Por meio da articulação entre dois campos principais - o visual e o urbano -, este dossiê buscou conjugar pesquisas que tensionassem discursos, imaginários, representações, figurações e políticas sensoriais em torno de diferentes cidades africanas. Nesse sentido, o conjunto de artigos aqui reunidos dedicam-se, a partir de diferentes perspectivas e abordagens, a apresentar modos de (re)imaginar e problematizar a vida social, a arte, a política e a cidade colonial e pós-colonial, seus trânsitos, utopias e subversões, em suas dimensões práticas, políticas, estéticas e sensoriais.
Este artículo analiza el fotolibro Monsanto®: a Photographic Investigation del fotógrafo documental Mathieu Asselin. En primer lugar, se abordan los fotolibros desde una perspectiva semiótica, especialmente empleando las funciones de Roman Jakobson, y después, en este caso, se entiende parcialmente la diferencia entre fotolibros y fotoperiodismo como una cuestión de tiempo, ya que los fotolibros suelen informar sobre hechos que no están de actualidad. Después, se considera Monsanto® en relación con la tradición de los fotolibros bélicos, especialmente Agent Orange: «Collateral Damage» in Viet Nam, de Philip Jones Griffiths, y War against War!, de Ernst Friedrich. Asselin relaciona a las víctimas de la guerra con las víctimas de las corporaciones capitalistas, superando la diferencia colonial entre los soldados occidentales y las víctimas orientales, y profundizando en las causas del capitalismo bélico. Monsanto® también toma decisiones sobre los límites de la fotografía para presentar el mundo y, por ende, sobre la visibilidad. A diferencia de Friedrich, Asselin asume que la fotografía no tiene que representar visualmente todo lo que se cuenta en el libro, además, los pies de foto brindan información esencial y algunas fotografías solo pretenden mostrar lo que Asselin presenció. Finalmente, se utilizan las consideraciones de Nassim Nicholas Taleb sobre evidencias para comprender cómo la fotografía se destina a ser evidencia de hechos, lo que podría llevar a que las imágenes precedan y creen el evento relatado por ellas.
O trabalho pretende refletir sobre a fotografia enquanto um objeto de apreciação artística e enquanto um campo de análise no âmbito da história da arte. Toma como referência o conceito de intenção, na acepção do termo como um definidor do objeto artístico representativo. A fotografia tem sido repensada nos últimos anos por historiadores, filósofos e fotógrafos que utilizam conceitos plurais para a melhor compreensão da essência da imagem fotográfica. Especialmente no tocante à fotografia como expressão artística, há um contraponto entre a indicialidade e a intencionalidade na produção da imagem, o que significa questionar se todos os elementos da imagem fotográfica, cuja presença na superfície da fotografia é garantida pela indicialidade, são, de fato, resultado da intenção do fotógrafo. Tomando emprestada a idéia de Hiroshi Sugimoto de fotografia como fóssil e o instigante trabalho de Walter Benn Michaels Photographs and fossils, pretende-se explorar o recente debate que contrapõe a fotografia como representação figurativa à fotografia como causa indicial do real. Por fim, será questionada a procedência da idéia de que a fotografia não está enraizada nas intenções do fotógrafo.
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