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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Visual Communication Quarterly

Call for Papers

Visual Portfolio: Domestic Images in the Digital, Online, and Viral Era

Guest Editors: David D. Perlmutter and Lisa Silvestri, The University of Iowa

Today anyone with a cellphone and an Internet connection can create and distribute images without professional training or a governmental or industrial institutional affiliation. Whether funny cat YouTube uploads, vacation videos (from a tsunami site) or pictures of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, images that once fell under the genre of “domestic” are now regularly erupting onto world attention, controversy, and influence. Likewise, ordinary citizens are delivering the first visual “draft of history” because they are first on the scene of breaking news-from terror-filled moments in a London subway after a bombing to an airliner landing on the Hudson River.

This special issue of VCQ seeks scholars and practitioners who study or document the blurring between “home” photography and “public,” professional, or commercial photography as it becomes increasingly indistinct in our viral digital/online/social media age.

Among possible questions to ask: What does it mean when the “home mode” goes viral? How does the role of the professional photographer and industry change when “citizen journalists” are creating so much public content? What new genres of photography are emerging in the home-public fusion? How does the domestic origin of an image affect its reception? What are the historical antecedents to this phenomenon (e.g., images of the Holocaust that were originally souvenir snapshots by its perpetrators or domestic scenes of celebrities made famous after their deaths?)

VCQ: Visual Communication Quarterly solicits contributions for an upcoming special issue on the domestic image. VCQ welcomes essays that consider the relationship between “home” and “public” modes of photography, visuality in a viral era, digitization, Photoshopping, cropping, and dissemination. In addition to theoretically grounded, critical essays, we will consider the submission of visual essays and photo pieces. Max. word length for essays: 7500.

Deadline for submissions: February 20, 2013

VCQ: Visual Communication Quarterly publishes scholarship and professional imagery that promotes an inclusive, broad discussion of all things visual, while also encouraging synthesis and theory building across our fascinating field of study. See: http://vcquarterly.org/ for submission style and guidelines. Please email an electronic version of your essay (as an MS Word document), along with a 100 word abstract, to david-perlmutter@uiowa.edu. For portfolios, send inquiry first.

EDITOR
Berkley Hudson, Missouri School of Journalism

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Post by guest correspondent Lindsey Davis

Photographers all over the world have been selling their prints online through a new curated art market. Artsia.com, representing the Society of International Artists, was launched last month as an attempt to better connect professional artists to those who love and want to buy their work.

Herve Constant is a photographer on Artsia, a London-based French artist whose pieces work to convey narratives or statements about society and the way we communicate with one another.  “Although I may have different interests along the way, insofar as one travels, one more or less arrives at the same point of departure.”  His piece “The Same Story” was published in conjunction with a poem by Mary Kay Rummel in the Original Limited Edition called ARTLIFE, and is now in the archive collection of the Los Angeles Museum Contemporary Art. 

Giovanni Capriotti is an Italian artist working in Toronto, Canada. His passion lies in documentary photography, and he’s traveled and lived globally, keeping track of his path in photographs.  His piece “All I Need” from the project “Moon Safari” shows a scene outside a fast food restaurant called Tim Hortons, a couple entering and a man leaving the eerily lit parking lot. He adds that “In my early work I was focused on the effects that we have manifested in our reality, now I find myself trying to articulate the trends and causes that we, as modern humans, are making on our world.”

Guilherme Ghisoni is a Brazilian photographer born in Santa Catarina with a background in philosophy and music. While researching the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein for his Ph.D. at the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Brazil, his reading began to affect his photographic art and layers of meaning began to emerge.  His piece, “Yet Present – Itapema” features a hummingbird flying gracefully with beak proudly lifted, in front of a nondescript purple background surrounded by layers of white airy bubbles.  He remarks that”My current works can be seen as a consequence of my interest in the contemporary philosophy of time and its bearing on photography.”

Artsia is working to create and support a community of passionate professional artists like these in every kind of medium, and is now representing more than 500 carefully selected artists worldwide.

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The World Photography Organization manages the Sony World Photography Awards, which offer several levels of competition ranging from amateur to professional photography.  This year’s deadline for submission is January 4, 2013.  Information is available at the website, along with images of previous winners and notables as well as current entries.

“Bear’s Claw,” Moorcroft, Wyoming, by Mitch Dobrowner, 2102 SWPA Photographer of the Year.

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Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation

Exhibition: Worchester Art Museum, September 30, 2012-February 3, 2013

The Worcester Art Museum presents an exhibition of some of the most powerful American photographs of the 1960s, the images through which the country shared that dynamic period and by which it is remembered. All from the museum’s permanent collection, the images date from 1958 to 1975, and include the presidency and assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the American space program and its mission to the moon, the antiwar movement and counterculture.

Symposium: Photography, Media, and Society: the 60s and Beyond
Saturday, October 13, 8am-5:30pm
WPI Campus (Olin 107) and the Worcester Art Museum
Free and open to the public
This major symposium will explore how photography has contributed to the collective memory of the country and has influenced American identity and thought. This day-long event will examine how consumption of visual images has changed – and how that change has influenced our collective consciousness. Topics of discussion include: why and how people remember images across time and cultures; how images have been transmitted to the public and what has evolved and changed to deliver messages differently (newspaper, television, and magazines, to websites and blogs); how “images,” even imagined, have a lasting resonance in our culture; and how media moments can affect our culture.

Speakers will include:

John Louis Lucaites & Robert Hariman (co-authors of the book/blog No Caption Needed)
Judy Richardson (Former SNCC staff, historian, and filmmaker, specializing in Black History & Civil Rights Movement)
James Willis (Journalist, professor, Azusa University, Author 100 Media Moments That Changed America)
Bestor Cram (film director/producer, and member Vietnam Veterans Against the War)
Jerry Lembcke (Author The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam and Hanoi Jane)
Gallery Discussion with Matthias Waschek, WAM Director and David Acton, WAM Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photography, and Curator of Kennedy to Kent State

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In two minutes, no less.

Our Story in 2 minutes/Notre Histoire en 2 minutes

Click on the link for a montage of photographs (and a few illustrations) that provide a rocket sled ride from natural history through human history.

Edited by Joe Bush.  Song by Zack Hemsey.

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Chelyabinsk, Russia, 1991

Marines in basic training taking part in an exercise known as the “Crucible.” Camp Pendelton, Oceanside California, 2002.

La Semana Santa. Seville, Spain, 2010

War in Iraq, near Basra, 2003.

“La Condition Humaine,” an exhibition of sixty photographs by Peter Turnley, has opened at the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.  The show provides a retrospective on Turnley’s work over several decades.  If you can’t get to Paris, you can see some of the work at websites that also offer an interview or commentary on the show.

The exhibition closes on November 3, 2012.

Photographs courtesy of Peter Turnley.

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Petrochemical America
Photographs by Richard Misrach
Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff

Exhibition: August 25 – October 6, 2012, Aperture Foundation 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, N.Y. 10001

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of specific environmental abuses in the region, and expands into an extensively researched study of the way in which petrochemicals have permeated every facet of contemporary life in America.

What is revealed over the course of the book is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole. Misrach and Orff’s collaborative examination of Cancer Alley points to the past and into the future, implicating neighborhoods and corporate states. It also aims to participate in new thinking about how we can best divest ourselves of our addiction to petrochemicals, and to sketch the outlines of a more hopeful future.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which garnered Aperture a nomination for a 2010 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year, and won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format Aperture book On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Earlier, Aperture published Violent Legacies, which addressed, in part, the contamination of the desert due to nuclear testing. Richard Misrach’s other books include Golden Gate, released by Aperture in spring 2012, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.

Kate Orff (born in Maryland, 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.

The book can be purchased here.

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Capture 2012: Photography, Nature, Human Rights

Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop at Yale

October 12-13

CALL FOR PAPERS

Photographic documentation has become a key tool in the fight for human rights and against political violence, mediating responses to global zones of distress.  Photography is often thought of as a way of disseminating evidence of human rights violations in order to call for immediate action.  Capture 2012 proposes to divert attention to another aspect of these broadly circulated images:  Human rights violations are never captured independently of their harmed environments.  At the same time, violations reported around the world are directly related to the devastation of natural resources like air, light and water, whether interpreted as catastrophic events or gradual declines.  Communities on the move after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, or North African migrants landing in the Italian island of Lampedusa, were only tenuously represented in the media in connection to the ecological crises in the background of their flight.  However, those visual representations suggest new understandings of the conditions of visibility, the environment and the relationships among them.

From another perspective, photography can be perceived as subjected to parallel environmental transformations, as in the case of smog darkening the photographic images coming from places like Linfen, China.  We hope that by linking photography to the environment and to environmental critiques, we could start a discussion that enriches the discourse on human rights as a way of sharing the world and sustaining it.  We wish to bring together challenges to the claims of human rights and critical analyses of photography.  Therefore, we intend to include images and ideas in our conversation as a way of connecting theory and practice, scholarship and art, activism and writing.

Capture 2012 invites contributions and interventions from various fields and practices such as: international law, journalism, history of art, photography, political science, geography, literature, sociology and cultural studies.

Topics of visual and/or textual presentations may include, but are not limited to:

-          Human rights and contemporary visual culture

-          Cameras and activism: theoretical and practical perspectives

-          Human rights and animal rights in dialogue

-          Nature photography and the meaning of disaster

-          The politics of earthquakes, floods, and droughts

-          Environmental sensibilities in visual communication

-          Visual representation of uclear power in contemporary media

We seek short papers (10-12 pages) or visual presentations that will advance the conversation around the issues that Capture2012 embraces.  If you wish to present your work at the conference, please send a 300 word abstract (Word format only) and a short bio no later than September 15, 2012 to capture2012.conference@gmail.com

Keynote speakers: Anne McClintock, the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Madison, and Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University and Director of Photo-Lexic International Research Group, Minerva Center, Tel Aviv University.

Capture 2012 is supported by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, the Yale Law School, and the Yale Photographic Memory Workshop.

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Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation announce The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, celebrating the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography.

Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation have joined forces to celebrate the book’s contribution to the evolving narrative of photography by launching the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards.  Two categories have been created:
- First Photobook Prize
- Photobook of the Year Prize.

Entries will be accepted from July 15 through September 10, 2012.

A shortlist of thirty titles will be profiled in The PhotoBook Review, will be exhibited at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais and at Aperture Gallery in New York, and will tour to other venues to be determined.

The award winners will be announced, at Paris Photo, November 14-18, 2012.

Additional information and entry forms are available here.

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Photoworks is excited to announce the fifth edition of the acclaimed Brighton Photo Biennial, once again bringing international and emerging photographers and artists to the city.  From October 6 through November 4, 2012, Brighton will be populated by free exhibitions, new commissions, events and interventions, at a host of established and more unusual venues across the city’s urban landscape.

You can read more about it here.

Photograph by Jason Larkin.

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