Vanessa Meikle Schulman [The wound around his eye] has been constantly open, suppurating and discharging ever since … with loss of strength and increasing blindness in the left eye which is very weak & he is less & less able each year to do any manual labor or care for himself. 1 Applying in 1882 for an increase to his Civil War pension, Private James M. Greenleaf, who received his facial wound at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, attempted to convince the government that his eye—unhealed and rapidly losing its sight—was so debilitating as to prevent him from earning a living through gainful employment. To the above statement in his pension application, Greenleaf added an “affidavit signed by 24 acquaintances stating that his wound was worse than the loss of an arm or a leg.”2 Though Greenleaf also complained of pain in his hip, it was the wound to his face, with its leaking pus, that made him “totally & permanently helpless,” as the government surgeon wrote on examining him in 1907.3 The claim that Greenleaf’s …

  Safiya Umoja Noble Introduction Google has become a central object of study for digital media scholars due to the power and impact wielded by the necessity to begin most engagements with social media via a search process, and the near-universality with which Google has been adopted and embedded into all aspects of the digital media landscape to respond to that need.1 Therefore, the near-ubiquitous use of search engines, and Google, in particular, in the United States demands a closer inspection of what values are assigned to race and gender in classification and web indexing systems and the search results they return. It also calls for explorations into the source of these kinds of representations and how they came to be so fundamental to the classification of human beings. In this research, I am interested in knowing two things: what kinds of results do Google’s search engine provide about Black girls when keyword searching, and what do the results mean in historical and social contexts? I also want to know in what ways does Google …

Alexander García Düttmann At one point in Walter Benjamin’s A Brief History of Photography, the photographic medium is defined in terms of a surplus.1 Or, to put it differently, it is this surplus that is said to account for what is “new and particular” about photography. In a photograph, Benjamin suggests, there is always a remainder that cannot be integrated into whatever it is that turns this photograph into a work of art, into an artist’s work. Whatever testifies to the art of the photographer must exclude this other element, as if photography as art were as much the result of an achievement as the result of an exclusion, of a failure to capture what it is that makes photography into photography, and as if this failure were not the fault of the artist but constitutive of photography itself. Photography appears as an art that is supplemented by something that does not, and that cannot, belong to art. But what is it that Benjamin means by “art”? The answer to this question can be sought in …

Robert Stock and Beate Ochsner I. Introduction In their book Cultural Locations of Disability, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder critically examine the Deaf-and-Blind-cycle made by Frederick Wiseman in the 1980s, and point out how the documentary filmmaker seeks to analyze the disciplinary techniques used in institutions for the blind, deaf and blind.1  The authors conceive of Wiseman’s observational “direct-cinema”-approach – that sometimes seems ambivalently voyeuristic – as a means of critique that aims at demonstrating how subjects are treated in these specific sites for the disabled and how such institutions “coerce acceptable behaviors and restrict bodily movements as their primary tactic.”2  Regarding the portrayal of the blind and deaf-blind within the institutional frame in these films, Mitchell and Snyder detect a hierarchy between the sighted and non-sighted that also surfaces in scenes addressing cane traveling. During the mobility training, individuals that have become blind are introduced to a dual discipline. For instance, a young woman “learns to maneuver a cane while also being subject to the evaluative oversight of the instructor.”3  It is a practice …

Trevor Hoag This essay is dedicated to the victims/survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut (2012), and to victims/survivors of (gun) violence everywhere.1 It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or [ . . . blindness]. — Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster2 A forgetful memory of events. The morning of September 28th, 2010, I shuffled half-asleep from the bedroom to my office intent on perusing the Web. After checking my email and the news, not a lot stood out. However, while reading Facebook posts from members of the UT-Austin community, my blood ran cold: Trish Roberts-Miller (September 28, 2010 at 8:29am): just heard there is a shooter on the UT campus, at 21st and Guadalupe.3 Trish Roberts-Miller (September 28, 2010 at 8:44am): Lots of sirens, and I’m sitting in my dark office filling out forms.4 Clay Spinuzzi (September 28, 2010 at 8:45am via @spinuzzi on Twitter): apparently campus is on lockdown due to armed shooter. i am …

Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013) Christopher Schaberg On a recent morning as I browsed through my Twitter home feed, I noticed some intriguing buzz about using the iPhone Siri function to “see which plane is flying overhead.” I’ve been thinking about this common experience lately: when you notice an airliner in the sky. But I am less interested in identifying the specific planes and their mapped lines of flight, and more curious about the feelings and sensations that such sightings produce, if only for an instant. Hiraki Sawa’s video artwork Dwelling (2002) considers this experience in uncanny ways—ways worth lingering on, if not determining precisely à la Siri. Dwelling begins outside an ordinary apartment. We approach; we enter and ascend a staircase.1 At first, upon entering, everything seems stunningly ordinary; it’s just a plain apartment. Suddenly we see airplanes on the floor. Or is it a taxiway? From the outset, Sawa plays with familiar perceptions of environment, the interior-exterior divide, spatial logic and ground. Next, we see a few planes on a small table. …

Alicia Inez Guzmán and Alexander Brier Marr As the first generation of PhDs trained in visual culture programs settles into tenured positions and important curatorships, our field continues to grow in ways that its founders hardly anticipated. An expanding institutional network encourages a rethinking of vision and visuality, two key terms in visual studies. In The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff reconfigures visuality.1 Typically considered as a perceptual field, Mirzoeff describes visuality as the historically variable self-envisioning of authority. Taking a global and historical view, Mirzeoff identifies a series of countervisualities. As this issue of InVisible Culture demonstrates, the role of vision is changing, too. There are a number of elements affecting these movements, including the influence of materialist thinking, ebbing critiques of “hyper-reality,” and a burgeoning interest in relations between media (as opposed to the modernist emphasis on media specificity). Twenty-five years into our interdisciplinary venture, we can reconsider an early, important idea in visual studies: that vision is the primary way people make sense of the world. For better or worse, we can no longer …

Guest Editors Alicia Inez Guzmán is a Doctoral Candidate in the program in Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on the visual culture from and about the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. Alexander Brier Marr is a Doctoral Candidate in the program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on American and Native American art, with a dissertation that addresses the display and representation of indigenous architecture in North American visual culture. Authors Lidia Klein is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw and is the recipient of the Foundation of Polish Science Scholarship (2012).  She is also a Fulbright Alumna (Duke University, 2010/11). Her research focuses on architecture and design. (http://uw.academia.edu/LidiaKlein) Jonathan Schroeder is the William A. Kern Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Visual Consumption, co-author of From Chinese Brand Culture to Global Brands: Insights from Aesthetics, Fashion and History, editor of Conversations on Consumption and co-editor of …

Erin Leary A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angle would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940. 1 In 2002, in a now well-documented rebranding effort, the cable television network American Movie Classics …

Guest Editors Amanda Jane Graham is a Doctoral Candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester.  She has an M.A. in Communication and Culture from York University and a M.S. in Education from Brooklyn College.  A former New York City public school teacher and community organizer, Amanda is interested in the social life of art post 1960.  Her dissertation examines site-specific dances representative of Manhattan’s shifting economic, political, and architectural landscape of the 1970s. Amanda edited the IVC issue on Mad Men because she loves the show, and because she knows, as Don Draper does, that fiction is as meaningful as fact. Erin Leary is currently completing her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where her dissertation focuses on women’s participation in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century’s nativist and eugenics movements in America prior to the vote. Previously, she completed an MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. She also serves as adjunct faculty in Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School …

Written by Monique Miggelbrink In the midst of Mad Men’s first season, Sterling Cooper’s office manager Joan Holloway informs secretary Peggy Olson about her promotion to copy writer. At the end of their conversation, Joan refers to her position as messenger: “Well, you know what they say: the medium is the message.”1 Of course, the viewer can classify this as one of the show’s many anachronisms. We know that Marshall McLuhan’s slogan, which is one of media studies’ essential phrases, became popular in 1964 and not in 1960 as depicted by the show.2 But there is more to that. This famous sentence self-reflexively signifies that Mad Men’s form, its complex serial condition, is central to the way it represents the past. The medium, i.e. Mad Men as contemporary hybrid serial television drama, is the message as it signifies the show’s basic principle of investigating the past. We follow the characters of the fictional Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper through their troubled public and private lives, and see them struggling, sometimes even capitulating, in the light …

It has been nearly six years since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf of Mexico cutting a swathe of devastation and shock through the psyche of the American people. Exacerbated by the recent BP oil spill in the region, the storm and its aftermath remains an open wound for local residents and others affected by the disaster,leaving many in the Gulf Coast facing an uncertain future. Between August 23rd and September 1st, 2005, at least 1,836 people lost their lives in the hurricane and subsequent floods. Mass-scale human suffering and overwhelming property damage and losses ensued in the wake of government uncertainty and inept relief efforts. The most severely affected area, New Orleans, which flooded as the levee system buckled to the might of the Category 4 hurricane, continues to reel from the storm and its deeply political consequences today. While tourist attractions do their best to convince us of the city’s recovery, high-water marks scar the exteriors of abandoned buildings, reminding visitors and residents alike of the uncomfortable truths about Hurricane Katrina and the many displaced people who continue to wait to reclaim …