Search Results

While social scientists and policy experts wrestled over the relationship between the “ghetto” and the “neighborhood,” a new cadre of cultural workers used representational formats to urge a reassessment of the place-based loyalties of the inner cities. A question that consumed various 1960s cultural workers was how to represent areas of physical devastation and economic deprivation without dehumanizing their inhabitants or erasing their histories. Chapter 6 surveys three distinct answers, as established in the output of the photographer Bruce Davidson, the social psychiatrist Robert Coles, and the museum director John Kinard. By documenting neighborhood relationships in low-income city cores, each sought to displace liberal hand-wringing and conservative condemnation with more affirming portrayals of everyday local life. But while Davidson and Coles were outsiders looking in, seeking to discover evidence of neighborhoods and neighborliness, Kinard and his colleagues at Washington, D.C.'s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum instead framed African-American neighborhood histories as potent tools in contemporary civil-rights struggles.

Sociologist María A. Cabrera Arús dissects the militaristic iconography of the Cuban Revolution and its ironic appropriation by contemporary Cuban artists. Cabrera Arús demonstrates that the celebration of the sartorial guerrilla identity of the 1960s has largely given way to a critical perspective on the epic narrative in the post-Soviet era, which is exemplified by painters like Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas and photographers like José Ángel Toirac. In recent artworks produced in Cuba, the olive-green uniform of the revolutionary army appears more often as a symbol of oppression than as a metaphor for a utopian vision.

This chapter discusses Perpignan, the world's largest celebration of photojournalism, held in southern France in early autumn. Visa Pour l'Image celebrates artistic and subjective vision simultaneously with the belief in an indisputable visual truth-telling. Importantly, it is also a celebration of mobility, both of images and of photographers. Based on Visa 2003 and 2004, this chapter looks at photojournalism's confrontation with the amateur threat posed by the rise of citizen journalism and the abuse photographs taken by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib, which are considered by many to be the definitive images of the war in Iraq. It focuses on the production of ideals of authorship and individual ways of seeing, “personal vision,” alongside the differentiation between local photographers who document specific news events and cosmopolitan photojournalists praised for their masterful storytelling.

This chapter examines World Press Photo, an international platform for photography that runs the world's most international and prestigious annual competition in photojournalism. In addition to fieldwork conducted at World Press Photo's Awards Days 2004 and the fiftieth anniversary in 2005, this chapter is based on the author's experience at the Masterclass offered in Amsterdam for a highly selective group of a dozen international photographers, and at a seminar for young photojournalists in a developing country held over the course of three years. World Press Photo contributes to a discourse of photography as a universal storytelling medium while also offering seminars in “developing” countries aimed at training promising photographers in how to see in very particular ways. Thus, the world in World Press Photo is not one that is given but one that can be developed through photography.

This chapter turns to photographic modes of reproduction and from historical to theoretical accounts of photography's role in the construction of racial meaning. It examines the verbal strategies through which Jim Crow signs recruited the authority of the logos to add race to the divisions of the social universe. It highlights the work of African American photographers and invokes Charles Sanders Peirce's differentiation among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs to question photography's role as the iconic complement to logos. Despite the photograph's (iconic) resemblance to the things it represents, the camera registers traces (indices) of things that disrupt our mental image of the world. The reading of photography's symbolic signs draws by contrast from Roland Barthes, tweaked against his inclination to associate what he calls the rhetoric of the image with the dominant ideology. The chapter concludes by turning to the 2000 exhibition “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present,” a massive retrospective of black photography.

This chapter examines the complex inquiries posed by visual culture studies against the uses of the visual in the construction of cultural memory. It analyzes the pressures that have made Jim Crow signs available for scrutiny. Too offensive to enlist the aesthetic interest of northern photographers such as Walker Evans and too routine to capture the attention of Southern documentarians, the signs were surprisingly underdocumented and their representations underdisplayed. Several questions thus emerge: How and by whom has Jim Crow's visual record been produced? Where has it been lodged? And why has it registered so lightly in the public domain? How did the racial signs both elicit and evade the attention of photographers from diverse racial, ideological, and historical locations? This chapter also considers the conditions of production and publication that have made it possible to avoid encountering or conceptualizing these photographs as a coherent cultural archive, and how a few iconic images have come to fill the cultural void.

This chapter brings together sites of assimilation and elimination, beginning with the imaginative bedrock of Jim Crow: the restroom doors and drinking fountains whose parallel alignment, derived from and reinforced by the sexual division, affords the illusion of a stable binary. The side-by-side arrangement also indulges the photographic fantasy of a neutral position. This chapter explores how that fantasy was betrayed by the association of specific racial labels and bodies. It tracks the evolution of perspectives along a historical axis from the 1930s through the 1960s and across the spectrum of subject positions occupied by the photographers. At stake in the depiction of Jim Crow signs for women were the boundaries of gender, destabilized through the juncture of race and waste, and renegotiated by the camera's extension of the visual frame to embrace contradictions and contiguities. The juxtaposition of front and rear with the lateral structure of gender was an especially disturbing feature of racial segregation's geography in the eyes of another observer.

Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be thought of as its metaphoric stomach, an even more fundamental and therefore more highly regulated site of social incorporation. Buttressed against the threat perceived in new waves of immigration during the 1920s, the restaurant wall became a figure of a national frontier, redrawn down the center of the counter when the economic pressures of the 1930s forced the racial barrier to the interior. This structure required photographers to align themselves with one side of the racially marked division or the other. This was an especially vexing dilemma during the Depression, whose widening social rifts bolstered a national faith in photography's inclusive and reparative power. The visual politics of the nation dovetailed with and found an emblematic scenario in the visual politics of segregated eating. The threads of race, gender, and visuality converge—with ironic consequences—in Dorothea Lange's photograph of a Mississippi lunch counter.

This chapter looks through the other set of lenses that photographers trained on the segregated theater during the 1930s. Movie theaters, unlike most segregated sites, marked only their “colored” entries, since local knowledge could be trusted to ensure that the unmarked front entry would be restricted to whites. At this asymmetrically signed location, documentary photographers bring us to the movies through the entry to the “colored balcony.” By defining a perspective both toward and implicitly from that balcony, their photographs envision modes of resistance to the movie camera's captivating gaze. Disenchantment is implied by a visual insistence on the step-by-step exterior staircase that challenges the fiction of cinematic continuity, and on the play of shadows that calls into question the promise of substance on the screen. Disillusion assumed more tangible forms among the upstairs spectators, whose narratives often recount the covert pleasures of a balcony location that was shielded from surveillance by the white audience downstairs. Reading these photographs and narratives together uncovers the potential for disturbance that was galvanized in different ways by the spatial plans of segregation

Even after his legal demise, rumors of Jim Crow's death were greatly exaggerated. This did not dissuade photographers from documenting the public dismantling of Jim Crow signs in the aftermath of legislation banning their display. In the years bracketing the turn of the century, with the explicit sanction of the George W. Bush administration, the discourse of color blindness was cynically adopted to legitimate dismantling programs to redress the enduring legacy of racial segregation. In a pointed challenge to the claim that color blindness represents a current reality rather than a future dream, segregation signs have been redisplayed to protest the rolling back of the affirmative action policies that were implemented to redress segregation's effects. The 1998 film Pleasantville presents a monitory example of the ways that an increasingly blurred memory of Jim Crow can be recruited to translate harsh racial divisions into multicultural harmony. This afterword considers the repurposing of Jim Crow signs by activists and artists who seek to turn their discriminatory uses to progressive aims.

This chapter talks about the representation of Palestine in the photography of Khalil Raad. The early photographers of the Levant were almost exclusively Armenians, and Raad was one of the few Arab photographers who became prominent in this period. His photos indicate to what extent local artists had internalized the orientalist discourse of European photographers in their “documentation” of the Holy Land. Moreover, Raad's portraits of Ahmad Cemal Pasha and Mersinli Cemal Pasha, the two main commanders of the Ottoman forces in Syria, appearing in relaxed family and social settings, were circulated widely during the war. Raad's portraits of the two men helped him gain access to the inner circle of the Ottoman administration.

This chapter presents an account of Roy DeCarava's epic, imagistic narrative the sound i saw, which comprises photographs taken in the 1950s and 1960s but not widely published until 2000. DeCarava's the sound i saw: improvisation on a jazz theme can now be seen as his crowning achievement as a photographer and African American artist—nearly half a century after he first conceived and planned it. This remarkable collection of 196 photographs weaves examples of urban photography dating from the beginning of the 1950s, when DeCarava became the first African American photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, together with informal portraits of jazz musicians, taken between 1956 and 1964, with the addition of an elliptical poetic text written by the photographer himself.

This chapter examines time in contemporary culture. Slowness as an aesthetic practice and a mode of reception features prominently in much contemporary photography and film, defying the fast-paced entertainment conventions and the capitalist commodification of time, as are evident, for example, in recent blockbusters. While mainstream films favor fast-paced cutting, jerky and unfocused panning, or hectic zooming, slow cinema and slow photography embrace grammars of minimalism to interrupt the cult of speed. Slowness in this sense is more than a binary term in opposition to speed: it is an aesthetic art practice that may include the employment of digital or analogue technologies; slow diegesis and slow narrative; the gallery or cinema as a contemplative exhibition or reception space; and a responsive spectatorship. The chapter then debates the concept of slow art in dialogue with international art practice, as exemplified in the performance art of Lee Lozano and Marina Abramović, before analyzing the representation of time in the works of two prominent German photographers: West German Michael Wesely and East German Ulrich Wüst.

Let's be honest. Editors, as any writer will tell you, aren't all that bright. They may say they're looking for stories that will teach something important about the way the world works, but mostly they want to be entertained. They can't follow leaps of logic. They get distracted by elaborate prose, and they have no patience for boring factual details. They get confused by too many characters in a narrative, or they're easily irritated by extraneous quotes. And they don't like big words very much, either. In other words, we editors are a lot like the readers that we—and you—are trying to reach. In fact, we're a special kind of reader, in that our livelihood depends on our ability to think like the audience of our publications. This is the case for any kind of editing, not just science editing. Writers may shift tone or approach for different markets, but editors live and breathe our readers' way of life. We must internalize their interests, who they are, and what they expect from our magazines, newspapers, or Web Sites. Editors know what level of scientific language our readers will understand and what they won't. Each one of us also deeply understands our publication's unique mission. Many people say that to be a good editor you first have to be a good writer and reporter. We editors like to think so, too. Having had experience as a writer helps inform good editing, and gives the editor a firmer appreciation of the reporter's point of view. And it's certainly true that, if necessary, an editor must be able to step in and complete the reporting and revisions on an article. But more than being good writers, editors must be good critical thinkers who can recognize and evaluate good writing—or can figure out how to make the most of not-so-good writing. Especially when the subject is science, which can be complicated and convoluted, a good editor needs a sharp eye for detail. We need to be organized, able to envision a structure for an article when one does not yet exist, or to identify the missing pieces or gaps in logic that are needed to make everything hang together.

Madalena Schwartz was another important foreign photographer of São Paulo. She was also a Jewish refugee (from Hungary, via Buenos Aires), and although she did not begin working in photography until late in her middle age, she went on to become Brazil's most important portrait photographer, working extensively in publicity and producing images of some of the country's most prominent citizens. However, Schwartz also developed a personal artistic line to her photography. Working exclusively in black and white and venturing into the outback, she might be said to be Brazil's first eco-photographer. Of interest to this study, however, is her perspective on marginal urban groups; she is famous for her images of often marginalized Afro-Brazilians, such as the singer Clementina de Jesús and the spiritual leader Mãe Menininha do Gantois, as well as the transvestite performance group, Dzi Croquettes, whose creative resistance to the censorship of the 1964 military coup won them an international audience. Despite being an intimate portraitist, Schwartz was able to capture the enormous complexity of urban life.

Chapter five reconceptualizes the notion of the tableau vivant by focusing on some of the encounters between film and photography, which are also marked by a fascination for bodies arrested in time. Particularly examining the film still of classical Hollywood films, this chapter traces the historical development of this photographic genre through an investigation of the statements made by ‘still men’ in trade journals throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In addition, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of the film still, which implies a specific kind of light, focus, narrative, temporality and the instantaneous. Finally, it investigates how these elements were taken up by prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who have appropriated ‘cinematic’ formulas in their works since the 1970s, as well as by contemporary video artists who developed the ‘still film.’

This chapter considers the story “The Oval Portrait” (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe and its relation to the daguerreotype, which Poe enthusiastically wrote about in an article in 1840. It argues that in today's world, where intensive photographic documentation of our lives often begins at birth, the wishes and hopes that people had of the portrait in Poe's time are still with us; for example in many people's desire to own a drawing or painting of a loved one after their death rather than merely photographs. If none has been made in life, some people will take a photograph to an artist and ask for a posthumous portrait. There is apparently something that photography, which has changed technically out of all recognition since 1839, cannot provide, perhaps that very thing that compelled Poe to make his central character in his story a painter, rather than a daguerreotypist.