Reading Of Photographs Research Articles

“Sweet Like Honey”: Twa Photographers Reframing the Past, Present and Future in a Remote Rwandan Marginalised Community

ABSTRACT Nyabageni, a small village in north-west Rwanda, is home to a remote rural community of historically marginalised people, formerly known as Twa. Today the village is made up of both those who grew up in the forest and those born in the new settlement into a very different Rwanda. This article examines the artistic work of 12 members of the community who took part in a participatory photography workshop in May 2022. It discusses what the Nyabageni artists’ striking images tell us about conceptions of the past, present and future, and how their self-narratives contest and reframe ongoing prejudice. Close readings of individual photographs show how they: re-animate the past; place members of the community in roles they have previously been excluded from; mobilise visual imagery to activate social change; and stress reparative internal perspectives on a close-knit community. Focusing on the aesthetic and strategic choices made by the photographers, we discuss the complexity and sophistication of their vision, which expands existing literature on Twa identities in the Great Lakes. We also reflect on the role of photography in foregrounding the complex memories, dreams and aspirations of marginalised indigenous people.

Surface and Depth: Reading Photographs in Obasan and The Invention of Solitude

Since its invention, photography has been imbued with the promise of providing a sense of fullness and has been believed to possess the unique capacity to capture the entirety of a moment. On the other hand, such assumed potentiality to capture all is yet found subject to the surface, and photography turns out to be a sort of art that lacks depth. This paper intends to focus on the tension between surface and depth in the representation of photographs in literature, a topic that is often neglected in literary studies. Through the theoretical lens of Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s discourses on photography, this paper examines Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, both of which expose the discrepancy between what is visible on the surface and what lies beneath, as well as between what is within the frame and what exists beyond it. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how Benjamin’s and Barthes’s discourses on photography lead to the discussion of the surface and depth issues. The second part deals with the photographs in the two literary works, exploring how theoretical concepts of photography, including Benjamin’s “the optical unconscious” and Barthes’s “punctum,” will help shed light on them. By juxtaposing critical discourses on photography with these literary works, this paper concludes that their representation of photographs grapples with the tension between surface and depth and resonates with Benjamin’s and Barthes’s notions on photography.

“WORDS NOT SPENT TODAY BUY SMALLER IMAGES TOMORROW”: READING PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE EMERGENCE OF POSTWAR PHOTOGRAPHIC CRITICISM IN THE USA

This article examines the idea of ‘reading photographs’ as it circulated in postwar American criticism. It looks principally to the work of Henry Holmes Smith and Minor White and the way in which they deployed the idea, as well as the institutional framework of photographic journals in which their writing circulated. The essay examines the role that the concept played in helping establish photo-criticism as an established genre of writing, and explores particular emphases in that writing that proceeded from the claim audiences ‘read photographs’; of these emphases, the most important and germinative ones centered around photographic traditions and their capacity to establish the parameters of the photographic medium itself. From the vantage delineated above, the essay also situates photo-criticism in a larger universe of postwar concern, one that centered on the mutual convertibility of pictorial and linguistic forms: the development of ‘visual literacy’ discourse, protocols for training photographers as these emerged in the 1960s, and broader agendas in the postwar American university system, with all their interest in visual pedagogy.

Pics or It Didn't Happen: Reading Photographs in the Reef Tank Community.

In 1961, Lee Chin Eng jumpstarted the reef hobby, a hobby dedicated to the modeling of coral reefs in captivity, with an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist. He illustrated the article with eight photographs; these images were meaningful to the hobbyists viewing them and they conveyed both information about the tank system and also claims about Lee's expertise. This paper examines three genres of photographs-landscapes, active, and passive portraiture-that appeared in Lee's article and how and why they have proliferated in the reef hobbyist community over the last sixty years. By tracing the history of these genres, we can better understand natural knowledge producers rely on photographs to exchange knowledge and cement community identity.

GI Photos of Calcutta: Toward a Vernacular Understanding of War

Abstract During World War II, more than a hundred thousand US soldiers, popularly known as GIs, camped in Calcutta, India, to steer the Eastern Front war against the Imperial Japanese Army in the China-Burma-India theater. The port city became a strategically relevant transit hub for the soldiers to airlift food and military resources, alongside channeling information to war zones. But it also acted as a site for the rest and recreation of the soldiers. With higher salaries and added scope for leisure in Calcutta, the pervasive presence of the GIs introduced a new orientation of military relationship with the public—more cordial, touristic, and commercially transactional than the British officials. Military photographer Clyde Waddell captured the recreational activities of GIs in the streets of Calcutta at their behest and self-published sixty photographs in 1946. Though the images depict everyday scenes in the colonial city, their thematic elements and semiotics betray the ideological designs of the US Army in an era of changing global equations. Waddell's images inhabit a curious location between wartime reportage and personal memorabilia. This article undertakes a semiotic reading of such photographs by Waddell to situate the complex location of the American GIs in the erstwhile capital city of the disintegrating British colony.

Photographic Power

In Raw Histories, her 2001 compendium of essays on photography, anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards writes of the layers of historical significance and meaning that colonial photographs bear. She elaborates: During the hours, days and months spent in many places, working with photographs … I have talked to people looking for ‘history’. This history has been both the actuality of evidential inscription, and their own particular ‘realities’. They are looking for their own history or someone else’s history, for the history of their discipline, or confronting the nature of their colonial past, both the colonised and the colonisers; people looking for their ancestors, people making, re-making or even imagining histories.1 Edwards succinctly gestures towards the many stakeholders of the colonial photographs: museum professionals, historians and anthropologists, but equally the descendants of the subjects of these images who find traces of themselves in imperial archives. The passage refers to efforts to prize alternative histories away from dominant narratives of colonial vision and its encyclopedic logic. It also refers to ongoing efforts to bestow personhood, lineage, and afterlife to the sitters of imperial images, the majority of whom were photographed in the context of great asymmetries of power. These alternative practices of reading photographs against the grain as a way of resuscitating Indigenous-centred narratives do not as often make it to the page. In the immense wealth of scholarship that colonial photography has generated, from studies that centre the performance of savagery to the development of exoticist codes, to the efforts of colonial officers to produce encyclopedic albums, literature concerning Indigenous revisions and interventions in the material as a means of challenging colonial epistemologies is less prominent.2 This begs the question: has the dominant literature in this area facilitated enough of a shift in methodologies to prioritise the non-colonial, entangled histories of these photographs? How can archival and art historical method be transformed to accommodate narratives of the photographed?

Reorienting Visual Reading

AbstractThis essay explores visual reading and its colonial aspects by analyzing the novel Ze ʿim ha-panim elenu (The One Facing Us, 1995), by Ronit Matalon, an Israeli Jewish author of Egyptian descent. In this novel Matalon displaces the dramas of Mizrahi Jews (Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world) to Cameroon, thus stressing her protagonists’ uneasy positioning within the colonizer-colonized, West-East divides and connecting Zionist racialization to broader, global processes of colonial capitalism. By exploring her elaborate readings of photographs in the novel, the essay reveals two rival traditions of reading the visual: the first involves what might be described, following Matalon, as a certain “intending toward” the photograph—a colonial reading practice through which a subject converts her absence from the photographic moment into a visionary, intentional presence. In this Barthesian tradition, the image is an empty land to be colonized, and Oriental subjects are racialized by being fetishistically associated with both authentic matter and theological aura. The second tradition, typified in the novel by the protagonist’s Egyptian mother, is a laborious collective practice of reading photographs that is attentive to subtext, nonverbal communication, and social codes. The essay argues that this reading practice has nothing to do with postcolonial or Levantine hybridity or with a “migratory state of mind”—concepts that govern scholarship on Matalon—and that its subsistence requires in fact a solid, counterdiasporic sense of home.

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges

Situated imagination of Zionist borders: the feminist gender nonconforming photography of Yael Meiry

How does the history of a nation’s relation to transgender subjects affect their situated imaginings of national territorial borders, collectivity boundaries and gender barriers? This article offers an answer to this question through a close reading of photographs by the artist Yael Meiry. Based on a visual culture analysis of Meiry’s intervention in dominant Zionist historical narrative I argue that by using their photography as an arena of a feminist, gender nonconforming situated imagining, Meiry upturns Zionist normative border-making of territory, collective and gender, demonstrating that they are always interrelated and interconnected. The article focuses on the ways in which Meiry’s situated imagination challenge the imposed normativity of the Zionist mechanisms of bordering as it is embodied in three historical dominant Zionist icons of borders, boundaries, and barriers, which were constructed as a part of the invention of a national tradition: the map, as an icon of Zionist territorial borders; the palm tree, as an icon of Zionist collective boundaries; and the fist, as an icon of the Zionist gender barriers.

Learning Method and Evaluation for Elementary School Sixth Graders Aimed at Developing Their Ability to Read Photographs

Learning Method and Evaluation for Elementary School Sixth Graders Aimed at Developing Their Ability to Read Photographs

Working Faces, Facing Work: Portraying Workers at Work and the Search for the Soviet Individual

Abstract Images of workers were ubiquitous in Soviet visual culture. Other than in capitalist countries, the Soviet visual regime was inextricably linked to the faces of working people; workers were elevated to the ‘status of icons’ in newspapers, journals and movies alike. According to Soviet ideology, every worker contributed to socialism, which is why everyone was worthy of portrayal. The article traces the discussion among professionals and readers in Soviet journals about how to portray working people both in their professions and their everyday lives. In the 1960s, Soviet photographers actively propagated a shift from portraying the profession to portraying the individual. A close reading of photographs published mostly in Sovetskoe foto details how Soviet photo-graphers aimed at capturing individuality in the first place, how photography helped establish typical and un-typical notions of individuality and work, and to which extent the a-typical became the new typical.

Working Faces, Facing Work: Portraying Workers at Work and the Search for the Soviet Individual

Abstract Images of workers were ubiquitous in Soviet visual culture. Other than in capitalist countries, the Soviet visual regime was inextricably linked to the faces of working people; workers were elevated to the ‘status of icons’ in newspapers, journals and movies alike. According to Soviet ideology, every worker contributed to socialism, which is why everyone was worthy of portrayal. The article traces the discussion among professionals and readers in Soviet journals about how to portray working people both in their professions and their everyday lives. In the 1960s, Soviet photographers actively propagated a shift from portraying the profession to portraying the individual. A close reading of photographs published mostly in Sovetskoe foto details how Soviet photo-graphers aimed at capturing individuality in the first place, how photography helped establish typical and un-typical notions of individuality and work, and to which extent the a-typical became the new typical.

Sexualización de niñas en redes sociales: la necesidad de inteligencia semántica en Instagram

Instagram es la red social favorita de los millennials. Sus normas comunitarias prohíben los desnudos, salvo en casos de mastectomías, lactancia materna, cuadros y esculturas. Su inteligencia artificial solo detecta porcentajes de piel en fotografías. Al no poseer inteligencia semántica, sus algoritmos no descubren otras formas de hipersexualización. En este subterfugio, niñas y chicas muestran sus cuerpos vestidos y cosificados, con uniformes escolares, rodeadas de elementos infantiles. Recrean el mito de Lolita y consiguen millones de seguidores. Este trabajo describe este oscuro fenómeno para investigar: los hashtags que emplean esa nueva forma de pornografía no censurable por los algoritmos; las percepciones objetivas y subjetivas de esas fotografías; y una propuesta de intervención en materia de género. El trabajo contiene dos fases: una exploración bibliográfica longitudinal, que ahonda en Instagram y sus condiciones de uso, la identidad personal y narratividad, y la inteligencia semántica para leer fotografías; y una indagación que correlaciona la reciprocidad de los hashtags, su denotación normal y su connotación hipersexualizada. Los resultados se ordenan en torno a dos modalidades: niñas que no tienen edad legal para tener una cuenta y chicas que sí tienen edad legal para tener una cuenta. La parte cuantitativa recoge: etiqueta, nombre de la cuenta, país y seguidores. La parte cualitativa explora: descripción de los elementos de las fotografías, significados normales y significados pornográficos implícitos. Se concluye que es necesario: detectar otros hashtags que describan otras pornografías; ampliar esta prospectiva internacionalmente; extrapolar esta investigación a otras redes sociales, como YouTube y TikTok; compartir los resultados con las redes sociales y las Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad; monitorizar el uso de las redes sociales por parte de los progenitores; formación en los entornos educativos; adquisición de inteligencia semántica por parte de las redes sociales y de los menores.

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú

Reviewed by: meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú Amanda Ellis meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction. Edited by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. iv + 330 pp. $105.00 hardcover/$34.95 paper. meXicana Fashions explores the complex cultural politics undergirding various aesthetic modes, self-adornment traditions, and shared vestimentary practices and their relationship to Xicana identity formation and cultural belonging. This dynamic, unparalleled edited collection is organized into three sections: “Rendering of Self: Personal Narratives/Personal Adornment,” “The Politics of Dress: Saying It Loud/Saying It Clear,” and “The Politics of Entrepreneurship: Making (It)/Selling (It).” Through thirteen chapters, the volume illuminates the significance of fashion, performance, and personal aesthetics as reactive processes and “strategic weapon[s] of public self-presentation” by teasing out the ways fashion is leveraged to counter the stigmatization and derogation of social identity (14). The volume’s raison d’être is to “argue that meXicanas are exposed to more fashion and aesthetic vocabularies than those floating in the hegemonic sea of fashion” and that these vocabularies constitute an array of political meanings behind Xicana sartorial choices (14). Garments like huipiles and accessories like sarapes, rebozos, and huaraches are understood as stylized multidimensional cultural phenomena that make up the tactical practices and visual semantics that variously signify meXicanidad. Ergo, the volume theoretically situates dress as an everyday mode or technology of resistance by which people “declare allegiance to particular intersectional identities or . . . refute them” (8). The single greatest strength of this collection is its diverse interdisciplinary and topical reach. meXicana Fashions forwards the analysis of poetry, novelistic [End Page 190] discourse, visual archives, blogging practices, and song lyrics by bringing together literary criticism, auto-ethnographies, transcribed platicas, and the qualitative and quantitative content analysis of mass (print) media. Several chapters contribute to discussions of decoloniality, as they relate to self-stylization, Indigenous fashion shows, and community art exhibitions. Each chapter sophisticatedly elaborates the conceptual terrain in which to wrestle with fashion in relationship to political praxis, effectively illuminating the ways sartorial choices become the mechanisms by which people articulate ownership of their bodies by refashioning, asserting, and/or reclaiming an identity through self-adornment. In the first section, Norma E. Cantú contends that though the huipil garment is linked to a specific region of origin and communal group, huipiles take on new politically charged meanings when donned by Chicanas. The volume opens with the voices of women who “claim the garment as a signifier of Indigenous identity” and who self-consciously don the huipil as a “referent to their ethnic identity, albeit one that has been denied them as mestizas” (41). Chapter 2 forwards Josie Méndez-Negrete’s intimate retrospection and visual art that recounts how sewing and embroidery became central to her survival and metamorphosis after her move to the United States. She vividly describes the huipil as part of a counter-aesthetic and as “a living, inspiring, and protective garment” that announces both her own indigeneity and her solidarity with other Indigenous women (68). In chapter 3, Micaela Díaz-Sánchez interviews women in the professoriate who use clothing as part of an expressive technique and political intervention, describing dress as part of “a choreography enacted by Chicana academics” as they navigate academic institutions (74). Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs’s auto-ethnography renders an analysis of song lyrics and common refrains to think through the complex signification of attire in chapter 4. The author ultimately asserts that though ethnic outsiders can only “abstractly and at best marginally comprehend the deep cultural meaning instilled” in Maya garments, “Indigenous clothes carry an equally immense value for Chicanas, serving as a deeply personal expression” of identity (101). Chapter 5 closes out the first section of the volume, and in it Domino Renee Perez poetically grapples with her South Texas familial legacy through close readings of vintage family photographs and dress practices to reflect on the relationships between intergenerational memory, adornment, family resemblance, and belonging. The second section begins with an ethnographic exploration of women’s use of the quinceañera tradition and consumer...

The Boy on the Beach: A Semiotic Reading of Photographs

Photojournalism has been an important aspect of reporting social trauma since at least the American Civil War (1861–65), bringing the horrors of conflict “into the living-rooms” of homes across the world. Based on the photographs of two Syrian refugee children, Aylan Kurdi (“the boy on the beach”) and Omran Daqneesh (“the Aleppo boy in the ambulance”) the present research suggests that photographs of children in conflict are particularly memorable across different cultures: through their appeal to empathy they are able to resonate with viewers in a very direct way. Each of these photos has been widely reproduced in newspapers and on television worldwide. The photos acquired iconic status, published, forwarded and repeated in a plethora of media, including in the recent cases vast exposure on social media.

Espacialización y análisis del proceso de ocupación de unidades territoriales residenciales en la circunscripción IV, Río Gallegos

El presente trabajo tuvo por objetivo reconocer y espacializar las Unidades Territoriales Residenciales (UTR) de la Circunscripción IV, Secciones B y C de la Tercera Franja Residencial (TFR) respectivamente, de la ciudad de Río Gallegos, Provincia de Santa Cruz, Argentina. La metodología que sustentó la investigación comprendió salidas de campo, recopilación y lectura de bibliografía científica, relevamiento de ordenanzas, cartografía, fotografías aéreas e imágenes satelitales. La información recolectada se procesó a través de un Sistema de Información Geográfica (SIG), y se identificaron UTR, nueve en la Sección B y seis en la Sección C. Los resultados aportan a la zonificación del uso del suelo que debe realizar el Municipio de la ciudad de Río Gallegos.

A Feminist Still

What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in New Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.

Reconocimiento y espacialización de Unidades Territoriales Residenciales (UTR) en la circunscripción IV – Sección B. Río Gallegos

Este trabajo es producto de una beca de investigación CIN, la cual tuvo como finalidad reconocer y espacializar las Unidades Territoriales Residenciales (UTR) de la Circunscripción IV – Sección B de la Tercera Franja Residencial (TRF) de la ciudad de Río Gallegos, provincia de Santa Cruz, Argentina. Para llevar a cabo esta investigación se recurrió a la observación directa a través de salidas de campo, lectura de bibliografía científica, relevamiento de ordenanzas, cartografía, fotografías aéreas e imágenes satelitales, para luego procesar la información recolectada a través de un Sistema de Información Geográfica (SIG). Se han identificado nueve UTR presentes en el área de estudio, y se dio cuenta de los elementos que constituyen el Paisaje Urbano del área de estudio, a saber, los usos del suelo, proceso de ocupación, entramado y tipo de vivienda/tipología arquitectónica. Este trabajo aporta a la zonificación del uso del suelo que debe realizar en el área de estudio.

Observation as photography: A metaphor

From its invention in the middle of the 19th century to the present date, photography has generally been considered as a highly reliable means for capturing data about a wide range of objects and for a huge variety of purposes. Though debated, photography’s relationship with reality is specific and powerful. Because of its long and rich history, photography has encountered many problems and challenges observation methods and practices in management studies. Taking photography as a metaphor for observation in general, this article explores the successive steps of a research project relying on observation. Taking photographs is capturing data; reading photographs is analyzing and interpreting data; and showing photographs is presenting the findings in publications. For each stage of the process, various issues are discussed, drawing on the scientific, forensic, artistic, or vernacular uses of photography. Particular attention is accorded to key examples in the history of photography. This article is an invitation to reflect on observational methods and practices in a non-demonstrative, heuristic manner.

Bitter Emotion: Affective Archives and Transnational Solidarity against Apartheid

In his book about his Irish–South African family and his childhood under apartheid, White Boy Running, Christopher Hope writes of the “bitter emotion” that infuses the politics of both Ireland and South Africa. This essay considers how the histories of political struggle in both places are intertwined through readings of photographs taken in Ireland and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I draw on these photographs to develop an argument about how affective archives of music, images, and poetry travel across time and space and serve as a conduit for raising awareness about injustice and for forging transnational solidarity. At the same time, these photographs provoke a consideration about how Irish identification with the struggle of black South Africans is complicated by the longer history of British colonialism and racism and how solidarity requires both remembering and forgetting. This essay also begins to trace the presence and work of South African activists in Ireland who campaigned against apartheid while they were in exile.