Author: IVC Author

Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible

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  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 …

Art Forever New

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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 …

Translations of Blind Perception in the Films Monika (2011) and Antoine (2008)

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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 …

Elusive Memorials: Blind-Spots, Insight, and Gun Violence at the University of Texas at Austin

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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 …

Hiltrud Aliber: Earthing / Unearthing: With Closed Eyes I See

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Hiltrud Aliber I draw with closed eyes. My closed eyes allow me to take a break from the relentless visual processing required by our contemporary technological culture and visual-material world. Enabled by the drawing process, my inner journeys navigate a strange geography where areas of the paper activate specific sites on the mental landscape, unearthing what has been dormant or lost, and reclaiming or earthing it. By closing my eyes I relinquish familiar methods of control, but gain access to ways of seeing and experiencing I could not have anticipated. For San rock artists the rock face represented a veil between tangible reality and the spirit world. Paper and charcoal have for me become mediating vehicles between inner and outer, visible and invisible worlds. The idea of drawing with closed eyes developed over many years. Night-drawings in the wilderness – sleepless from malaria drugs – initiated the process. The comforting stillness and inner connection experienced through different meditative practices, paved the way to a reflective form of drawing. Encounters with Betty Edwards’ blind contour drawings, …

Carolyn L. Kane: Color Control 1: Caught & Escaping

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Carolyn L. Kane Artist’s Statement: This piece is inspired by some recent video art which blends luminous and opaque color with photographic imagery. Color, like water and electricity, is difficult to harness and control. Who is to say when we have caught it and when we have not? The body may respond affirmatively to what it sees, optically, haptically, or otherwise, but the body too is hardly within our control. It is like color, also caught within technologies of control and discipline. While there are ceaseless attempts to escape, these attempts are only ever conceivable within the conditions of possibility of that system, rendering each attempt futile and frustrating. Photoshop Color & Stylistic Blindness in Contemporary Digital Imaging  by Carolyn L. Kane “Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time…” —Marshall McLuhan (1964) Color, like water and electricity, is difficult to harness and control. Who is to say when we have caught it and when we have not? Analogously, the human body may respond affirmatively to what it sees, optically, …

Aesthetics of Politics: Zero Dark Thirty

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Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013) David Fresko The Bush Administration’s declaration of a global war on terror—a foreign policy imperative continued below Obama’s banner—inaugurated more than the attempted realization of a neoconservative “Project for a New American Century.”1 It amplified class power through the accumulation of dispossessed natural resources from foreign lands and the aggressive neoliberalization of economic policies.2 An all-out media blitz—“shock and awe”—established the aesthetic contours of these objectives and generated its unique visuality: soldiers’ video diaries, green-tinted night-vision footage, embedded journalism, and jihadi torture tapes. Documentary and fiction filmmakers mined this visuality in pursuit of aesthetics concomitant with contemporary politics. Documentaries such as Alex Gibney’s examination of extraordinary rendition in Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight (2007), which explored the invasion of Iraq, Errol Morris’ procedural re-enactment of prisoner humiliation in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Standard Operating Procedure (2008), and Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s depiction of combat in Afghanistan in Restrepo (2010) – to name only the most notable – were produced …

Plane Sighting

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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. …

Two Exhibitions, Politics of the Invisible

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Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013) Taisuke Edamura Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012. London, Hayward Gallery. 12 June – 5 August 2012 / Gallery of Lost Art, an online exhibition curated by Tate. 2 July 2012 – 2 July 2013. Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012 is a unique attempt to consider the meaning of “how to look at art.” The show, comprised of invisible artworks by twenty-six artists, foregrounds a notion that so-called invisible art has little to do with identifying the invisible with the ontologically absent. Its interest lies rather in the way to suspend ‘visibility’ as the most predominant condition for the production and appreciation of works of art. Granted, viewers still found some amount of the visible in the gallery space despite the presumable emptiness suggested by the exhibition’s title. Nonetheless, most of the presentations in the show recounted the absence of conventional art as a tangible object, particularly artworks that documented things and events no longer available or showed only themselves as empty containers rather than explicit content – …

Molyneux Redux

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Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013) Georgina Kleege In 1693, William Molyneux wrote his famous letter to John Locke where he proposed the following thought experiment. What if a man who was born blind but had learned to recognize through touch certain geometrical forms such as a sphere and a cube, were to have his sight restored by an operation, would he then be able to recognize these forms through sight alone? This hypothetical question has led to no small measure of trouble for blind people, especially once actual medical procedures replaced the imaginary one Molyneux proposed. Sight restoring operations for totally congenitally blind people are relatively rare, but speculation about them is extensive. There have only been about twenty such cases in the past thousand years, but these twenty cases are so debated and scrutinized it seems like there must be many more, even though they typically follow a predictable pattern. The patients are initially excited and overwhelmed by the visible world. Researchers give them tests and tasks, sometimes including Molyneux’s sphere versus cube test. …

CFP InVisible Culture, Issue 21: Pursuit

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“Pursuit” – Issue 21 (Download PDF) For its twenty-first issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the topic of pursuit. We encourage authors and artists to reflect on the meaning and mechanics of pursuit across broad ranging phenomena. This term is meant to address two larger and related concerns. First, it prompts a discussion about matters of narrative, aesthetics, and medium, including topics as specific as the ‘chase film’ and crime narratives, to those as seemingly abstract as failure, paranoia, and process. Second, the word pursuit is meant to direct thinking toward a number of more clearly socio-political concerns, including, but not limited to, the topics of work and profession. In his new book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary worriedly observes that in the current global paradigm “the highest premium is placed on activity for its own sake,” and that it is the pursuit of sleep that stands as the most meaningful form of resistance in this context. We offer …

Panda: of Desire and Abjection

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Short film production has become more popular in the Arabian Gulf region recently, when compared to the predecessors in other regions of the Arab World. Aspiring young directors are finally beginning to receive the support they need for their creations. What matters to me more as a postcolonial feminist scholar is not the availability of funding — however important that is — but the issues presented within the short films themselves. I will take for example Panda (2012), an Omani/Kuwaiti short film directed by Jassim Al-Nofally to discuss from my point of view the transformative concepts these films are adapting and bringing into the picture. Panda is an 8 minute film about Ziad, a young man about to get married and facing the emotional dilemma of having to get rid of his beloved stuffed panda bear. Ziad eventually murders his Panda friend and buries him in the desert, leaving him behind and heading towards married life. While this film may carry different impressions to Arabic and international viewers, I believe that the basics can be …

Tasting Space

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Lidia Klein Among the senses engaged in experiencing architecture, taste remains the least active. Edible architectural structures seem only to exist in fiction, in stories such as The Gingerbread House, a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. The protagonists, Hansel and Gretel, are a young brother and sister cast away from home. Wandering alone through the forest, the two children discover a house made of cake and confectionery. Tempted by the luscious structure, the hungry siblings start to bite into its sugar windowpanes and gingerbread roof, not yet knowing this architectural treat is a trap set by a witch. In Grimms’ story, architecture appears as an object of immediate, bodily experience. Doors, roof, walls and other structural elements function as sources of sensual pleasure, as they are “nibbled,” “tasted,” and “enjoyed with.”1 The tale of Hansel and Gretel is still one of the most powerful stories on the sensual perception of architecture, yet it remains different from our experience of buildings. First, the gingerbread house lacks the constraints of “real” …

Snapshot Aesthetics and the Strategic Imagination

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Jonathan Schroeder This paper is concerned with photography as strategic imagery. Strategic imagery consists of images intended to persuade, promote, or otherwise perform strategic intentions. Encompassing advertising, billboards, packaging, promotional brochures, point of purchase displays, viral media, and website design, strategic imagery comprises a large portion of contemporary visual culture. Pictures of people–models, celebrity endorsers, spokespersons, “average” consumers, managers and employees—make up a large part of this imagery.1 In turn, visual images constitute much strategic imagery for products and services, about economic performance, or designed to promote organizational identity. Within this purview, advertising has long since moved beyond its traditional role of “showing products” or “informing” consumers. Much strategic imagery, of course, does not show products at all; instead, it encourages a range of aesthetic, cognitive and emotional effects to promote a vision of a brand’s essential role in a good life. Much of this promotion depends upon visual style, how images appear, and how they fit into broader trajectories of visual culture. If we take a close look at how strategic imagery deploys the …

Seeing the Sounds: Exceeding the Frame through the Acoustical Sublime in the Revelation at Sinai

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Raysh Weiss As the defining moment in the Biblical narrative of the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai stands unparalleled in its political and theological importance in Israelite history. Curiously, the Pentateuch (or Torah) offers conflicting accounts of the revelation in two of its books, Exodus and Deuteronomy. Both accounts cryptically describe the physical qualities of the awe-filled moment. The difference between these descriptions raises important questions regarding the sequence of events at the revelation, its mode of address, and the nature of the sounds.  Furthermore, each of the Biblical accounts describes the Sinaitic revelation from a different perspective, making a singular, cohesive representation of this event impossible. Illuminated Haggadot, dating as far back as the middle ages, prominently feature depictions of this defining event.1 A compilation of Biblical and Rabbinic texts, ritual prescriptions, and various blessings that serves as the manual for the Passover Seder conducted in Jewish homes, the actual text of the Haggadah dates from before the middle ages. Here, I examine pictorial representations of the revelation at Sinai in six Haggadot: …

Mediating Visual Experience: Zbigniew Libera’s Photographic Works and Google Street View Imagery

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łukasz zaremba The word “view” is used in a variety of ways: in specialist jargons, as well as common language. It functions as a synonym for landscape painting or photography, as well as for landscape perceived without the mediation of the picture (looking through a window, we take in the view). It’s a genre and a type of composition, but above all to view constitutes a visual experience and an element of perception. On the most basic level–that of popular art historical lexicons–the term usually operates as a neutral explenans. The fact that the genre of landscape is defined either as a view or a representation of a view calls our attention to the unclear positioning of this term. Is it a part of the world as it is seen or a result of the human act of creation? The view is certainly connected to images, representations, and pictures but also to imagination, appearance, apparition, and looks. And with the look, it is connected to vision, the gaze, eyes, and the notion of visibility. But …

Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture

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Reviewed by Jennifer Rachel Dutch, York College, York, NE Pamela H. Simpson. Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 248 Pages. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, local State Fairs and the great World’s Exhibitions tantalized eager visitors with stunning displays of American agricultural and technological advancement. Tucked amid the architectural wonders, unusual entertainments, and awe-inspiring mechanical gadgets, two forms of ephemeral food art may have piqued viewers’ interest: cereal architecture and butter sculptures. Constructed on a grand scale and decorated with a colorful array of vegetation, cereal architecture, like corn palaces, transformed ordinary crops into breathtaking architectural wonders as artists painstakingly grafted fruits, vegetables, grains and other plant materials to a wide variety of arches, columns, walls, and even entire buildings in eye-catching geometrical designs and beautifully detailed murals. At the same time, intricately designed and amazingly preserved for long periods of time, butter sculptures, ranging in style and subject from detailed carvings of Greek literary figures to scenes of daily …

Peoples on Parade

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Reviewed by Radhika Natrajan, University of California, Berkeley Sadiah Qureshi. Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 392 pages.   Sadiah Qureshi’s Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain presents an empirical challenge to more theoretically-oriented studies of Victorian exhibitionary practices. Surveying a century of metropolitan encounters with ‘other’ cultures, Peoples on Parade troubles accounts of hegemonic Victorian ideologies of ‘race’ and argues for the ways contingent historic circumstances shaped nineteenth-century demand for ethnographic performances, and consequently, ideas of human variety. Rather than a simplistic fetish of the primitive other, Qureshi argues there was a widespread, articulated engagement with displayed people. Importantly, it was ethnicity based in culture not biological racial dichotomy that framed nineteenth-century British understandings of human variety. Qureshi urges her readers not to simply dismiss ethnographic exhibitions as exemplars of Victorian racism, but to understand both the contexts from which these shows emerged and the social worlds in which they circulated. She situates the emergence of human exhibitions in the cosmopolitan milieu …

Alien Phenomenology

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Reviewed by Sandy Alexandre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ian Bogost. Alien Phenomenology: Or What it’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 168 pages. What does it mean to ruminate on and indeed end up insisting upon the limitations of human understanding, particularly with respect to what turns out to be the human impossibility of ever knowing what it must be like to be a thing? The approximation suggested by the word ‘like’ and that word’s simultaneous evocation of the figure of speech known as simile, in the book’s very title, offer something toward an accurate description of this human inability to apprehend in Ian Bogost’s pointedly circuitous Alien Phenomenology. According to Bogost, humans (who are also things, which are renamed “units” in the book) get closer to understanding these nonhuman units and their internal systems of operation through human manipulation of language. Metaphors, in particular, are used to facilitate and finagle the kinds of inter-unit relations that Bogost imagines can at least help remind humans that the world does not revolve around us. …

The Other Woman: Joan and Peggy move up in the world

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The title ‘The Other Woman’ is of course a reference to the angle the SCDP creatives originally take when brainstorming for their Jaguar pitch: positioning the E-Type as a beautiful, exciting mistress. However, it also brings to mind the inevitable comparisons the episode raises between Peggy and Joan. Following up on the diverging paths the two women have taken throughout the series, ‘The Other Woman’ focuses on sudden, unexpected progressions in their respective careers, and—more to the point—how those progressions are achieved. Peggy, after nearly an entire season of being passed over, under-appreciated, and now downright disrespected by Don, is once again encouraged by someone else to do something about it. Freddy Rumsen, her first champion all the way back in the ‘Basket of Kisses’ days, offers her a solution. Peggy wants to seek offers from other firms to metaphorically throw in Don’s face after he literally throws money in hers in an unwarranted fit of temper. Freddy feels that Peggy is being held back at SCDP and can really ‘shine elsewhere’, so suggests she …

Home Is Where?

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  Mad Men, of course, has always been a show about work. And although the characters seem to like one another, or at least many of them do, their connection, after all, isn’t so much friendship but a common pursuit – they work in an advertising agency together. Viewers have had pretty good access to the home of Don and Betty Draper during the first three seasons of the show, but Season Five of Mad Men has repeatedly taken us into the homes of its main characters in a way that it hasn’t before – as a means of delving deeper into their stories and giving us further refractions of their selves. What has been especially compelling about these at-home moments has been the tension between what we know of the characters from work and how we see them at home. From the very first episode, which began with Sally Draper awakening in an unfamiliar apartment and wandering into Don and Megan’s bedroom and culminated with its amazing set piece of Megan’s surprise party for …

“So Much Woman”: Female Objectification, Narrative Complexity, and Feminist Temporality in AMC’s Mad Men

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Fiona E. Cox In February 2011, in anticipation of the release of the fourth season of US TV drama Mad Men on DVD, The New York Review of Books published a review by Daniel Mendelsohn.  In what is a predominantly scathing assessment, Mendelsohn decries AMC’s critically revered series—set in Manhattan in the early 1960s and centering on fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper1—for what he argues is its hypocrisy in offering up “an alluring historical fantasy of a time before the present era’s seemingly endless prohibitions against pleasures once taken for granted.”2 The show’s hypocrisy, Mendelsohn feels, stems from its eroticization of that which it also seems to intend as shocking.  In his words: to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering.3 I would like to unpick one of the areas Mendelsohn holds up …

Mourning Becomes the Mad Men: Notes on Nostalgia

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Aviva Dove-Viebahn Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. ~ Svetlana Boym1 I. “Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women,” a 2008 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Jon Hamm, who plays Don on AMC’s critically acclaimed television show Mad Men (2007-present), succinctly identifies both the satisfaction and the absurdity of the series and its nostalgic appeal. In this satire, Don explains those who wish to emulate his success with women (as defined by quantity not quality of relationships) need only follow a few “simple” steps, the last of which articulates what is simultaneously seductive and disconcerting about the show’s unabashed nostalgia for the 1960s and Draper’s inexplicably charming misogyny: Finally, step four: look fantastic in a suit, look fantastic in casual wear, look fantastic in …

Serializing the Past: Re-Evaluating History in Mad Men

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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 …

The Affect Theory Reader

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Reviewed By Brent Strang, SUNY Stony Brook Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. 402 pages. Two decades after the affective turn, critical theory’s incorporation of emotion and the body’s materiality has become something of an imperative. Lawrence Grossberg, who is interviewed by Gregg and Seigworth for The Affect Theory Reader, laments how our frequent appeals to affect’s nature as ‘ineffable excess’ have too frequently let us off the hook from close empirical labor (315). The editors have answered his call by theorizing affect in all of its particularity and context. As such, the anthology might best be conceived as taking up a crucial second stage in this turn, organizing itself around a central premise summarized by way of Bruno Latour: “The body becomes less about its nature as bounded substance or eternal essence than the body ‘as an interface that becomes more and more describable when it learns to be affected by many more elements’” (11). The emphasis, then, shifts away from affect’s problematization of discourse—a …

How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis

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Reviewed by Christoph Raetzsch, Graduate School of North American Studies, Berlin Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 280 pages. Since the 1970s, N. Katherine Hayles has been exploring the zones of contact between the cultural formations of technology and the technological basis of culture, working between what C. P. Snow called “the two cultures” of humanists and scientists.1 Hayles’ previous works include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999), and Coding the Signifier: Rethinking Semiosis from the Telegraph to the Computer (2002), where she productively joined computer science, communication history and interpretations of classic and avantgarde literature. The common ground between these fields lies in the patterns, temporalities and structures that cultural forms exhibit to understand the neurological, psychological, and cultural impact of new technologies. How We Think is organized around the term technogenesis, by which Hayles means “the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together” (10). Putting an accent on the social dimension of developing and using …

The Right to Look

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Reviewed by Sara Blaylock, University of California, Santa Cruz Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011. 386 pp. Passionate and vigorous, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look proposes a novel critique of modernity. Linking the plantation to imperialism to today’s military-industrial complex, the author examines the role of “visuality” in modern history. As opposed to a perceptual definition, Mirzoeff’s use of the term relates to how authority self-authorizes by envisioning itself within a particular historical perspective. Authority’s visuality is a worldview––what Mirzoeff calls a “complex of visuality”––that seeks to naturalize and aestheticize its perspective in the classification and organization of the social order. The Right to Look describes the inherent instability of dominant visuality through a historical exploration of countervisualities. These alternatives position Mirzoeff’s “right to look” as a “right to the real.” This is to say, countervisualities confront authority’s narrow construction of reality by imagining and then asserting its alternative. The Right to Look is an exceptionally interdisciplinary text of impressive geographic and temporal …

Touching Photographs

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Reviewed by River J. Bullock, University of Wisconsin-Madison Olin, Margaret. Touching Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 288 pages. Moving beyond visual analysis and materiality of photographic objects, Margaret Olin crafts a series of essays that traverse the intersubjectivities and interactivity of the tactile looking they spur.  Composed in six chapters, Touching Photographs contributes to theory of photography, visual studies, and art historical understandings of canonical projects, including Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and W. G. Sebald’s texts. She also constructs fresh analysis of recent 9/11 memorialization practices, the collective historicization efforts of Susan Meiselas’ akaKurdistan interactive web project, and Abu Ghraib prison photographs. Olin situates this provocative collection of material amidst concerns of the agential relationship to the photographers, subjects, collectors, and institutions through which they circulate, and is persistently reflexive on the possibility of empowerment, imaginative community, and poignant identification they can inspire. Touching Photographs insistently rejects a “systematic understanding of photographic or photo-historical methodology” that might shape …

Spectacular Disaster: The Louisiana Superdome and Subsumed Blackness in Post-Katrina New Orleans

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Brian Greening Often enough, as in the contemporary United States, the association of place with memory, loss, and nostalgia plays directly into the hands of reactionary popular movements.1 —Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson The pleasures of New Orleans come from a crucible of undeniable pain.2 —George Lipsitz On September 25th, 2006, the New Orleans Saints returned to the Louisiana Superdome following a vagabond season that had them playing “home” games in San Antonio and New York. An understandably bewildered and preoccupied franchise following the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina, the Saints finished the 2005 season dismally with three wins and thirteen losses. But on the emotional homecoming night, spurred on by a boisterous crowd, the former drifting franchise started the game strong by blocking a punt on the game’s fifth play. Special teams player Steve Gleason carried the ball into the end zone for a quick touchdown. Head coach Sean Payton pumped his fist. Quarterback Drew Brees grasped his helmet by the facemask and thrust it in the air. Fans pounded stands draped in Saints banners …

Composing Catastrophe: Robert Polidori’s Photographs in After the Flood and Comparative Visual Records of Post-Katrina New Orleans

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William Taylor INTRODUCTION The form of cities, their design, and construction have long made it possible to think about human society, its representation, and values. Likewise, the destruction of cities through various means, accidental circumstance or human error, and the representation of urban ruin have given historical, visual, and narrative form to diverse values governing ethical conduct, individual desires, and collective responsibilities. In recent years a spate of natural disaster films like Volcano (1997), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009) have cast the city as a prime target for cataclysm or as a place to escape from following an apocalyptic event (think of escape films like I am Legend [2007] and The Road [2010]). The appeal of these films might be understood in view of present day environmental uncertainties or perhaps a state of anxiety in the world more generally. However, their coincidence with documentary coverage of very real cataclysmic events—such as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami’s destruction of Banda Aceh and Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans in 2005—leads one to question …