Reflections and Reviews (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Visual Metonymy and Text: The Pocket Cartoon and the Establishment of a Multimodal Paradigm in Britain’s Daily Express 1939-1969 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Whitworth
Newspaper cartoons are in essence a multimodal construct through which the cartoonist and the paper build levels of communication on a bedrock of signs, metaphor, and metonymy. Critics from Saussure to Barthes, Foucault and beyond have understood the importance of language in the formation of meaning, but it should not be underestimated how important metaphor and metonymy are to the visual. In this paper we consider their role in newspaper cartoons with specific focus on sign systems and visual metonymy in pocket cartoons. Specifically with the pocket cartoon, the use of an image along with text (the caption) works as a whole to create meaning by building on a shared knowledge with readers as well as an assumption of a shared belief system, often based on their respective newspaper’s editorial line. Through a study of a number of specific examples of Osbert Lancaster’s cartoons, this paper argues that the pocket cartoon represented not just a new form of visual satire in the British popular press, but also a key feature in the popularising of the country’s mass media through its use of the image as text.
Duregraph - Exploring Experienced Time Through the Post-photographic Image View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Van Vliet, Marcos Mortensen Steagall
This paper presents the outcomes of a practice-led research project that questions how the notion of experienced time might be articulated through photographic portraits. These images were titled duregraphs, a neologism comprised of the French duree and the Greek graphe. The aim of this study is to challenge conventions of power and anticipation between the spectator and the image and to broaden the ways that we might consider time as duration within post-photographic images. The resulting images negotiate a space between motion and stillness, where the spectator is rewarded for waiting with the image by the subtle movements that occur across the duration of their viewing.
On the Concept of Style in Aby Warburg: A Dialogue between Philosophy and History of Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rossember Alape
My paper establishes a dialogue between the philosophy of the image and the history of art around the theoretical problems raised by the concept of style. My study consists of showing that the anthropological approach of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) on the change of style in the pictorial arts, conceived as the result of a dynamic confrontation of forces deployed historically, in particular, in the historical creation, migration, reception, forgetting, and restitution of certain pictorial motifs (pathos formulas), allows us to understand essential aspects of the ways in which images, in general, create meaning. I hope to defend that the Warburgian approach overcomes the limitations that arise from the semiotic and perceptualist approaches typical of some more recent theories of the image.
Within and Without: Navigating the Orientalist Fantasy and Hybrid Identity Through the Architectural Settings of Lalla Essaydi, Shirin Neshat, and Hassan Hajjaj View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Piper Prolago
This paper investigates ways in which images of architectural backgrounds in three contemporary artists allow them to negotiate and articulate hybrid identities. Considering Lalla Essaydi’s “Harem” photo series, Shirin Neshat’s “Soliloquy” video installation, and Hassan Hajjaj’s “‘Kesh Angels” photo series, I discuss various means by which artists employ architectural settings to explore relationships with cultural spaces. Studying contemporary art of the Islamic world necessitates consideration of the ways in which Orientalist fantasies and the imagination of colonial authority shape aesthetic culture. Scholarship on this subject is lacking in consideration of the ways that architectural settings contribute to this discussion. Homi Bhabha posited that the colonial subject may assume a hybrid identity, repurposing colonial aesthetics to incorporate traditional forms and in turn reclaiming agency by taking control of their own representation. Considering Maurice Merlot-Ponty’s discussion of phenomenology and embodiment, individuals’ physical and sensory experiences are formative in understanding and building identity. Within this framework, the situation of figures in particular spaces is not merely the backdrop of a meditation on their identities, but rather a meaningful component of the message. I posit that in the three works I identified, architecture anchors the featured women in a cultural space. Their placement in relation to architectural structures is a means by which audiences can understand their connections to tradition and modernity. In this, each artist deconstructs binaries between the so-called “Occident” and “Orient,” between tradition and modernity, and in turn cultivates a representation that makes visible the instability of these binaries.
Featured Documentary Photography as Vocation: Reflecting on Frank Cancian’s Contribution to the Visual Social Sciences View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brian O'Neill
This paper explores the works of the late anthropologist Frank Cancian, specifically considering Another Place (1974), Orange County Housecleaners (2006) and Lacedonia – An Italian Town, 1957 (2017). Bringing Cancian out of contemporary obscurity is useful for visually oriented scholars in the social sciences from a theoretical and methodological standpoint - he simultaneously practices a documentary photography "without guarantees," and maintained a deep commitment to cultural relativism, distinguishing his practice as distinct from certain contemporaries like John Collier Jr. Re-reading his works together reveals Another Place as a point of departure, concretizing Cancian’s vision of documentary photography as vocation. Separating it from “professional” anthropology, Cancian sought new modes of expression through photography, thus confronting an enduring problem for visual scholars – how to engage the world analytically vs. aesthetically.
A Documented Pandemic: What Shall We See Next? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janelle Christine Simmons
This presentation will focus on examining COVID-19 during the past year via images and headlines - from January 2021 to August 2021/September 2021. The presenter will use images as the discourse for a discussion on reactions, responses and rights. After all, when else have we been able to witness a pandemic firsthand?
