From the Visual to the Textual: How Nazi Control of the Visual Record of Kristallnacht Shaped the Postwar Narrative

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Wolfgram
Keyword(s):  
Visual Record

Colonial Legacies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Nugent
Keyword(s):  
Video Art ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Type ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
Contemporary Artists

In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography and video art, these artists rework existent images and redress archival absences, making visible people and events occluded from dominant narratives. Their artworks are shown to offer a re-reading of the colonial and immediate post-independence past, blurring the lines of historical and speculative knowledge, documentary and fiction. Nugent demonstrates how their practices create a new type of visual record for the future, one that attests to the ramifications of colonialism across time.

Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110595
Author(s):  
Amaka Okechukwu
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Visual Record

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

Conclusion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wengrow
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Emergent Properties ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Elite Culture ◽  
Specific Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Visual Record

This book concludes with a discussion of the emergent properties of cognition. It first considers an essay published in 1942 by Rudolph Wittkower entitled “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” which documented the transmission of a particular style of ethnographic description (and depiction) from its earliest known sources in hand-copied manuscripts of the fourth century BC to the age of the printing press. The monsters in question fall mostly under this book's definition of “composites.” The book proceeds by examining how the counterfactual properties of composite figures were offset against two distinct forms of intuitive knowledge, one universal and the other historically contingent. It suggests that the specific distribution of composite figures in the visual record must be situated within the institutional dynamics of elite culture, and within particular strategies of governance that first took root during the Bronze Age, including the dissemination of officially sanctioned images through mechanical reproduction.

Modes of Image Transfer

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wengrow
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Image Transfer ◽  
Modes Of Transmission ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Mode Of Transmission ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
Epidemiological Approach

This chapter proposes some distinct patterns of transmission that are attested across multiple chronological periods and regional settings, shedding further light on the institutional contexts of image transfer in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The distribution of composite figures in the visual record raises a number of intriguing problems for the study of cultural transmission. Their impressive transmission across cultural boundaries is consistent with the expectations of an “epidemiological” approach to the spread of culture, which would accord them a special kind of cognitive catchiness. This chapter considers the institutional role of externally derived images within centralized (or centralizing) societies and suggests that the macro-distribution of composites follows two distinct but regular modes of transmission and reception: the “transformative” mode and the “integrative” mode. It also introduces a third mode of transmission, termed “protective” mode.

scholarly journals Bridging worlds: community led visual methods amidst climate change related disasters in Australia

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (Supplement_4) ◽  
Author(s):  
C Macdougall ◽  
L Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Visual Methods ◽  
Community Recovery ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
And Control

Abstract Background In February 2009 Victorian rural communities were hit by the worst bushfires in Australian history. Immediately we evaluated community groups preparing residents for bushfires. Ten years on, we are one of the few teams to evaluate medium to long term community recovery using multiple methods. As climate change becomes more visible, the frequency and intensity of disasters will increase so communities, governments and service providers need more evidence based strategies and policies. We explore how participant led visual methods provide new knowledge. Methods In study 1 participants in 3 of 7 focus groups in peoples’ homes spontaneously brought photos for us to examine before the discussions. In another participants spoke of the importance of photos they took at the time. We returned to the field to interview people in their homes about the meaning and role of photos. Results Participants wanted to inform us-as outsiders-of the awe and enormity of the fires. They created a visual record to communicate with key interest groups and ward off complacity as memories receded. Photos helped them construct timelines and meanings of the intense fires. Crucially, they recorded recovery and rebuilding in both the built and natural environments. Over the next ten years we chronicled stories from community led visual methods of communication, recovery and empowerment. We incorporated into qualitative methods participant led tours of their environments, with visual methods. Visual data collected by communities focused more strongly on the natural environment than researcher led verbal methods. Conclusions Visual sociology changes as technology provides participants in research with increased access to, and control over, visual methods. These changes can rebalance power relations between qualitative researchers and participants and bridge visual and verbal methods; crafting striking stories to influence those Australian policies unresponsive to climate change. Key messages Technological change enables participants in qualitative research to initiate visual methods to build bridges between them and researchers. Community led visual methods provide new types of data useful for theory and knowledge translation.

Artists and War Art

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret George ◽  
Victoria Young
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Entire World ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
War Art

A war artist is one who captures the subject of war in some type of artistic form. Since the beginning of time, artists have recorded scenes of war as a visual record of a culture’s existence and tribulations. Images of battles, ship portraits, leaders, and soldiers made up the bulk of war images until the late 19th century. The creators of the majority of these works are unknown, but when the entire world first went to war in 1914, nations hired official war artists to depict the action, including warplanes, tanks, and other newly developed technologies, among other aspects, as subject matter. These artists were mostly men, who were on the front lines sketching, painting, and photographing the action, collecting the visuals of war that they might then collate into an official work for a nation. As the 20th century progressed into our current era, images became immediately accessible on television and film, in news reports, and in live streams, as reporters embedded themselves with soldiers. Official war artists still exist in several nations, as do official collections of artwork created by them. We also have vibrant unofficial images of war produced by soldiers and prisoners for their own purposes, or by people protesting war itself. In compiling this bibliography, we sought to convey the breadth of war art mainly in 2-D media in chronology, type, artistic style, and maker, including voices of artists whenever possible. We also considered how artists from differing sides in battle impact each other’s artistic production. Being an artist who depicts war is a challenge. How do you convey honor and brutality, tradition and modernity, glory and defeat? How do you watch devastation around you and provide witness as you record the intensity and sadness of death? Combat artists of a particular country create art that reveals their experience of war. Is it personal? Or should it only be a documentary? The complexities found in creating the art of war are many, yet without these works there are centuries of battle we would not understand from social, political, or technological viewpoints.

Double exposures: the photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro

Modern Italy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-425
Author(s):  
Sarah Patricia Hill
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Double Exposure ◽  
Pier Paolo Pasolini ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Italian Culture ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Visual Record

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

scholarly journals Images of the Crowned Buddha along the Silk Road: Iconography and Ideology

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 92
Author(s):  
Rebecca L. Twist
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Mahayana Buddhism ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Mahāyāna Buddhism ◽  
Visual Record ◽  
The Silk Road

The interpretation of early Buddha images with a crown has long been a source of debate. Many scholars have concluded that the iconography of the crown is intended to denote Śākyamuni as a cakravartin or universal Buddha. A few have suggested it represents a sambhogakāya Buddha in Mahāyāna Buddhism. This art historical and Buddhological study examines the visual record of early crowned Buddhas along the Silk Road, focusing on the iconographic signifiers of the crown, silk items, and ornaments, and interprets them within a broader framework of Buddhist theoretical principals and practice. Not only is this a visual analysis of iconography, it also considers contemporary Buddhist literary evidence that shows the development of the iconography and ideology of the crowned Buddha. As a result of this examination, I propose that the recurring iconographic evidence and the textual evidence underscore the intention to depict a form of sambhogakāya Buddha as an early esoteric meditational construct. Moreover, many Buddhas perform one of the two mudrās that are particular to the esoteric form of Vairocana Buddha. Therefore, the iconography also signifies the ideology of the archetypal Ādi Buddha as an esoteric conception.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document