Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices

A collection of essays I edited with Divya Tolia-Kelly is just out from Ashgate.  It’s called Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices, and has chapters by Mimi Sheller, Mark Jackson, Mike Crang, Nirmal Puwar, Caren Yglesias, Judith Tsouvalis with Clare Waterton and Ian Winfield, Jane M Jacobs with Stephen Cairns and Ignaz Strebel, Karen Wells and Paul Frosh.  Its Ashgate page is here.

In its introduction, Divya and I write that “the collection privileges how visual and material concerns are attended to in contemporary research through a focus on practice. Practice is what humans do with things. Some of the effects of some those doings is to make things visible in specific ways, or not, and this approach thus draws attention to the co-constitution of humans subjectivities and the visual objects their practices create. This is somewhat different from enquiries based on looking, seeing, analysing and writing text; instead, it considers the (geo)politics of embodied, material encounter and engagement.”

All of the chapters talk about how specific materialities are made visible – visualised – through social practices.  They’re quite a mix of case studies, looking at, for example, aluminium, algae, walls, warehouses, ships, tv screens and memorials.  They all contribute towards understanding visuality as performative, as something done between people and objects, which creates complex fields of visibility, invisibility, and states that are not quite either.  Very few of them address art objects, or do anything resembling art criticism.  Journal of Visual Culture, take note!

The Handbook of Visual Culture

A copy of the new Handbook of Visual Culture arrived on my desk a few weeks ago, edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell and published by Berg.  The beautiful cover is a painting by Mark Francis called Episodic.

I have a chapter in the Handbook called ‘The question of method: practice, reflexivity and critique in visual culture studies’.  I first drafted it a while back, and the Journal of Visual Culture didn’t like it all; Ian and Barry, on the other hand, liked it a lot and are kind enough to say that it “makes a strong case for other paradigms of meaning and interpretation based upon situated practices, active audience reception and context-sensitive hermeneutics” (on page 535 – yes, 535 – of the Handbook).  While I’m enough of a pedant to have some quibbles with parts of that phrasing (particularly ‘reception’, which sounds rather passive and misses the co-constitution of seer and seen), the chapter certainly does argue against the implicit semiological methodology of much visual culture studies in broadly those terms.

The Handbook is full of interesting essays, including a nice one by Fiona Summers on photography and visual culture.  Recommended.

architectural atmospheres

I’m in the process of starting a new research project with Monica Degen and Clare Melhuish, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.  We’re looking at how architects are using digital visualising technologies when they design buildings, but also in their pitches to clients and in the branding of their studios; we’re particularly interested to find out if these new technologies are integral to the affective feel of architectural practices.  You can find out more information about the project here.

photographic assemblages

I’ve just finished reading a new book by Risto Sarvas and David M. Frohlich called From Snapshots to Social Media: The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography.  It’s a fascinating read, not least because the authors are almost entirely unburdened by the literature in cultural studies on domestic photography: there’s barely a mention of Barthes, for example.  This is refreshing, and helpful, because what it allows them to do is focus on the contexts – both social and technological – in which domestic photography is embedded, rather than write oh-so-movingly about the images themselves (their own illustrations are largely of cameras and networks rather than photographs), or oh-so-theoretically about the affect of the digital.  And what they argue is that family snaps are increasingly part of social media networks, and that this changing context is altering the editing, storing, sharing, content and organisation of family snapshots.

I agree.  I think a lot of photographs now are taken and shared not as referential evidence of the there-then (to use Barthes), but rather as ways of connecting with family and friends.  Sending a snap is less an act of archive dispersal and more an act of keeping in touch.  What this means for the images themselves isn’t addressed by Sarvas and Frohlich at any length.  I wonder though if in part what it means is that the images themselves don’t mean so much any more, because they are taken to be sent, not taken to be kept.  Which raises some interesting questions about the legibility of photographs now…

a performer at a school show, photographed by Giorgio Ciaccio aged 11, on his mum's camera.

The most enthusiastic photographer in our household is 11-year old Lydia.  Sarvas and Frohlich mention several times that many more children now own a camera, most often the camera in their phone, and they wonder what new forms of photography might emerge when kids are sending pictures to each other.  It’s an interesting question and one which I think they might have pursued a little more fully.  Because it seems to me that there are a lot of different kinds of photographies that are emerging, now that photography itself is such an ubiquitous practice.  Sarvas and Frohlich kind of assume that domestic photography is morphing entirely into online social media.  While much of it is, that’s not true of all domestic photography, and I think even when it does, there are social media and social media; several people I know have more than one Facebook account, with different privacy settings and different Facebookfriends, and they upload different photos to each.  Then there are the teenagers explored by Frohlich’s colleague Abigail Durrant, who have one (or more) Facebook photo displays, another set in their bedroom, and are part of further displays in other parts of their family home.

And then there is the increasingly blurred line between ‘domestic’ and ‘professional’.  In the last week at work I’ve met two more people who work for The Open University as administrators but who also work as photographers (that makes four now, and counting); and I’ve also learnt a lot from Gary Penny about how popular wedding photography is among keen photographers who want a career change.  And then of course there is the increasingly blurred line between how art photography looks and the appearance of other kinds of photography, a point made very effectively by Julian Stallabrass at a recent event organised by the Photographers’ Gallery and the networking project Archiving Cultures, part of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, called ‘Vernacular Photographies‘ (though as Julian also noted, in many other ways the line between ‘art’ and ‘other’ sorts of photography is very clearly policed by the critical apparatus).

All this suggests to me that all photographies are vernacular, in the sense that they are all practiced in specific social worlds, through particular combinations of software, hardware, objects, images, discourses, and subjectivities.  And there’s huge scope – as Sarvas and Frohlich also conclude – for much more research exploring these specific assemblages as they emerge.

reading the ‘situation room photograph’

Just looked at Marco Bohr’s visual culture blog and his commentary on the photograph of Obama watching the attack on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout.

Marco has also a collected a great set of spoofs of this photo on that post.  Here’s one I found:

Private Eye is a satirical magazine in the UK. Here it’s commenting rather cruelly on the fate of the Lib Dems, the junior partner in the current national government coalition, in the local elections held earlier in May this year.  Marco describes these sorts of spoofs as constituting “a wave of creativity (and mockery)”, and he’s right.  But what does that do to how we interpret the photograph itself?

The classic cultural studies approach to a photograph like this would be to isolate specific elements of it and discuss how they relate to wider structures of meaning: a mix of semiology and discourse analysis.  (Although of course one of the very interesting things about contemporary visual culture is that an awful lot of people can do this sort of analysis now, not just tenured profs in cultural studies departments: just listen to a radio phone-in about ‘the media’.)  Marco does something like this when he discusses the implications of how the photo pictures the figures of Barack Obama, Brigadier General Marshall B. Webb (the guy in the uniform) and Hilary Clinton. Looking at Clinton, for example, he suggests that her face is showing “tension, shock, and maybe even fear”, and since she’s the only person in the room showing any emotion, he suggests that the photograph is drawing on and reproducing the idea that women are more emotional and less rational than men.

Well, yes, I get that.  Except… is she looking very emotional?  The more I look at the photo, the less sure I am that she is.  Somewhere in his fantastic book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says that the photograph is “matte and somehow stupid”, and that the more you look at one the less you see in it.  This photo reminds me of that comment; I’m just not sure how to read Hilary’s face and hand.  So, is there a risk that, as good cultural studies scholars, when we read gender stereotypes into images, we are ourselves reproducing dominant discourses of gender?  Moreover, how are we supposed to interpret the sheer silliness of some of the spoofs of that photo?  What are we to make of the hunk pasted into the back of the room, or the one where everyone is wearing the hat that Princess Beatrice wore to the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William recently?

While it’s tempting sometimes to think that the main reason so many cultural studies scholars have now abandoned the interpretation of representation is because that skill is now very widespread — hence to preserve their mystique they now deal with philosophers and theorists far more abstruse than Stuart Hall ever was — thinking about what’s happened to the ‘situation room photograph’ also suggests some other reasons why critiquing the politics of representation can sometimes seem rather tired now.  First, there’s that concern that, in identifying oppressive representations, we are reproducing the power relations they picture, rather than dislodging them; secondly, there’s a sense that ‘dislodging power’ is rather beside the point of the joyful daftness of the spoofs that so many media images generate; and finally, there’s the perhaps rather more interesting issue of all that spoofing going on.  Perhaps the spoofing is the thing to explore, rather than — or maybe as well as — the meaning of the texts it produces.

I mean, just how did whoever made the hat spoof get all those hats at all those different angles?  How to approach the time, skill and energy that’s put into such spoofing?  And what are the effects when such spoofs travel into all sorts of different contexts, including, heaven help them, visual culture blogs like mine and Marco’s?

a question for film as a way of analysing social issues

I’ve been invited to an event on Monday 23 May at Queen Mary, University of London.  It’s part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that uses film to create an understanding of the transformations and continuities in how migrants manage their health.  The research participants are from Nigeria, Poland and the Indian diaspora; all now live in south London; some are recently arrived and some have lived there a long while.  The research team are Isabel Dyck and Iliena Ortega-Alcazar at Queen Mary and Marta Rabikowska and Matthew Hawkins from the University of East London.  The team are going to screen a first cut of the film and there’s going to be lots of discussion about health, migration, and using film as a method to explore those issues.

Well, I’ve never been involved in making a film, and health geography is not my field!  But their project reminded me of another film made a long time ago, in Poplar in east London.  I found it when I was doing some research in Tower Hamlets Local History Library in the mid-1980s.  I was trying to find out about Poplar’s local council, several of whom were sent to gaol in 1921 for spending all the local rates on the relief of the local poor rather than sending what they should have done to other local authorities like the London County Council.  The very helpful librarian there brought me a videocassette (remember them?), saying that he thought I might be interested in it – and I was – part of the film had news footage of the councillors parading through enthusiastic crowds on their way to prison in 1921.

Councillor Minnie Lansbury on her way to Holloway Prison in 1921. Note the film cameras in the background.

But I also got very interested in the film itself.  Made around 1973, distributed by an outfit called Liberation Films and called Fly a Flag for Poplar, I never managed to find out very much about who exactly had made it.   But it’s a fascinating film and raises some interesting issues about making films and about the relation between the people who make them and the people who are pictured in them.

Now, there are all sorts of heated debates about the ethics of filmmakers representing other people, particularly poor people living in difficult conditions.  The East End of London in particular has a long history of journalists, photographers, filmmakers and artists all creating sensationalist images of what in the late nineteenth century was often called ‘darkest London’.  What Fly a Flag for Poplar tried to do, though, was to make a film as a call to social activism in what was (and to an extent remains) a very poor area of London.  They wanted to get people in Poplar campaigning for their rights.  Hence they showed that newsreel film of an earlier struggle for social justice in Poplar, as an inspiration for efforts in the early 1970s to improve social conditions in the area.

What the film also showed, though, was the importance of the places that the film showed, and the importance of the place where it was itself shown.  The film pictures its own making; you can see people lugging around bulky video cameras with huge battery packs slung over their shoulder, meeting people, talking and filming as they went.  And the film also filmed its own premiere: in a big church in Poplar, which was packed with a huge and excited crowd watching, listening, commenting, catcalling and at the end of the screening bursting with talk and discussion and planning.

So, while what the film showed and told is important, just as striking to me is the attention it pays to the conditions of its own production (or at least some of them – there are no discussions of the editing process, for example), and the emphasis it places on its screening and its audiencing.

And it’s the last point I think I’ll emphasise on Monday.  A film is not just its images; it’s not just a cultural text.  It’s also a product, that’s made in particular ways, and screened in specific places to particular kinds of audience.  For a film like Fly a Flag, that hopes to provoke social activism, those contexts of production and audiencing are crucial parts of how the film works.  Which raises a question: what sorts of social practice should a film of social analysis incorporate into its screenings?

(A postscript – Fly a Flag for Poplar is now listed on the British Film Institute’s Film and TV database, where the people involved in its production are listed.)