Visual Essay Research Articles

Mumbai Dark Megacity: Informal Productions of Urban Night Space

Architect and photographer Élisabeth de Bézenac has been exploring many different types of nocturnal environments around the world, capturing changes in places after dark with the aim of informing urban design practices. In this visual essay, she reports on her nightwalking ventures into the 'evernight' life of Mumbai.

Springfield, South Australia 1928–1952: From Prestige Subdivision to Elite Suburb

ABSTRACT Nestled in the foothills of Adelaide’s leafy eastern suburbs lies the Springfield Estate. Springfield was established in 1928 as a planned prestige residential suburb. While the Estate approaches its one hundredth anniversary, the area’s original human occupation harks back some hundreds of thousands of years earlier, only entering Western written record when, not long after the Proclamation of the Colony of the Province of South Australia in 1836, a family of 150 Kaurna peoples, based at “Wirraparinga” near Brownhill Creek, were forced off their land by the establishment of several local large rural properties by wealthy settlers. The latter’s early rural holdings were resourced by the newly established Mitcham village, itself later to become part of what is now the City of Mitcham, which now includes 32 suburbs, including Springfield. In 1928, one of these early rural holdings, “Springfield,” comprising some eighty acres of sloping woodland owned by Mrs Frank Rymill, was bought by real estate agents Wilkinson, Sando, & Wyles (hereafter WSW), who subdivided it into 70-odd blocks, and marketed these explicitly to wealthy prospective home builders. WSW formed “Springfield Limited” and consciously and purposefully planned the area as a “prestige” subdivision; a community of well-off homeowners whose system would reflect the desire for image, privacy and control. Today, Springfield is a visual essay in the somewhat anodyne architecture of concentrated wealth. However, dotted amongst its sprawling footprint trophy homes, old and new, are some rather special, and well-sited mid-century modern homes that complicate a hitherto fore untold architectural story, all of which taken together, helps us re-evaluate the arrival of modernism in Adelaide, as well as shedding light on the dramatic social forces of the Depression and Second World War on exclusive master-planned enclave estates in Australia.

City of Pure Water:

This 9th and 10th grade multimodal writing unit takes a place-based approach to argumentative writing. Over ten lessons, students explore a local environmental issue through teacher-curated text sets before working with a partner to create a visual essay arguing for a community-based solution. The unit was originally designed and implemented in an Intensive Reading/English Language Arts combination classroom and aims to support and scaffold diverse learners. The unit is aligned to both 9th-10th Grade Common Core and Florida BEST standards on argumentation and organization. The goal of the unit is to foster students’ abilities to write and develop specific claims in their arguments.

Urbanising religion and health: naga symbolism in northeast Thailand’s urbanscape

ABSTRACT In the western part of the world today, religion is often overlooked in the planning of healthy and sustainable cities. Yet even though modern urban planning is assumed to be secular, places of worship can be seen throughout cities, and urban structures are built on existing historical spatial configurations which inevitably include religion. In Southeast Asia, religion is central to city planning, architecture, and building orientation, although the connections with urban health are less known. To stimulate discussion on the nexus of urbanscapes, religions, and urban healths, I analyse photographs taken in towns and cities in northeast Thailand about the naga, a giant serpent-like demi-god in Buddhism, folklore, and mythology. Specifically, by applying Davey and Grant’s [2024. The visual essay and knowledge production: towards a visually informed understanding of urban health. Cities & Health, 8 (1), 1–7] analytic framework for compiling visual essays, I ponder the following question and its implications: How might naga symbolism in the urbanscape of northeast Thailand be connected to urban health? I show that naga symbolism is pervasive in urban fabric and has potential implications for health including its reframing to something human-centred or value-centred or post-human.

Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine

In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.

Canonizing online activism: Memetic iconography in the North Atlantic Fella Organization

Memes are iconic digital artefacts that acquire meaning through their production and circulation among the digitally mediated publics. This visual essay presents an iconographic exploration of the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) – a vernacular online collective engaged in ridiculing Russian disinformation and rallying support for Ukraine’s defence and recovery efforts. We approach memes as a visual interface between the user and various subgroups within and outside the community. Drawing on a combination of autoethnographic, visual semiotic and computational methods, we demonstrate how memes perform three key functions within the online community: representing the self, maintaining social relations within the group and articulating the group’s values and commitment to its members and the broader public. In doing so, they can be understood as an extension of social and cultural practices surrounding religious iconography. Going beyond short-lived or self-centred engagement, memes constitute a rich yet flexible medium to mobilize social media users in significant international crises such as wars.

The Stories Objects Carry

Why do we hold onto certain objects? What stories are embedded within these objects? In what ways do these objects tell the stories of our lives, the relationships we form, and the lessons we learn? This visual essay reveals the unexpected meaning and discoveries I made as I used visual and narrative methods to explore the artifacts of my teaching life and the stories embedded within. Using a combination of drawings from my visual journal and written narrative, I examine three objects which hold vivid stories that exemplify the richness of my teaching experiences. I visually and verbally highlight instances where these stories crossed and connected, and the lessons I learned along the way. The narrative that emerged reveals how objects carry the memories and stories that define and illustrate our own histories, identities, and values, while also unlocking the ways we are connected.

Anthropocene Desire Lines: A Coal Story

In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from its Gondwanan beginnings, through its extraction from the Talcher Coalfields in Odisha in India, combustion in a thermal power plant in Ennore in Tamil Nadu, and into the future through its multitude of postcombustion afterlives. We do so through the figure of ‘anthropocene desire lines’, which draws on Karen Coelho’s idea of ‘water lines’ (Coelho 2022) and Gabrielle Hecht’s idea of ‘residual governance’ (Hecht 2023), to track how flows of earthly matter that begin in subterranean strata, and, mobilized by ideas of power, growth and national pride, result in indifference towards the molecular colonization of bodies, soils, waters and airs they produce (Mendes 2017). The essay compresses the deep, everyday and future times of coal and its geologic, territorial, microscopic and planetary scales into a single textual/visual narrative. In this way, it draws out simultaneities across time and interconnections across space, as a way of developing a relational Anthropocene imaginary.

Adaptive reuse among Baltimore’s historic churches: effect on social health

ABSTRACT This visual essay, from Maryland in the United States, examines the transformation of Baltimore’s historic religious structures in the context of community well-being and social health. As societal values shift, these 19th-century cathedrals and churches are repurposed into modern yoga studios, housing centers, and commercial ventures, adapting to contemporary demands and fostering alternative forms of community. While some of these new uses maintain or even enhance their role as community hubs, others prioritize consumerism over communal engagement, risking the erosion of social cohesion. This paper highlights both the challenges and opportunities posed by these conversions.

Exploring post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma in adult animation: a comprehensive analysis of Flee, Waltz witn Bashir and L'Image Manquante

Animation has been employed as a productive and subtle means to represent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and historical trauma. The aim of this article is to study the narrative, visual, and psycho-affective strategies of both phenomena through the films Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and L'Image Manquante (Rithy Panh, 2013). The ability of animated images to reconstruct moments for which there is no visual testimony, as well as their capacity to evoke the experience of traumatic events, emerges as the center of a specific aesthetic approach to history, forming a type of cinema of the real (Zylberman, 2022). Contrary to the tradition of documentary and visual essay, there is a more frequent expressive use of evocative mechanisms, dreamlike images combined with archival material, and forms of re-enactment of real events that necessarily do not involve the use of actors. The evocation of painful experiences establishes a visual framework in which the viewer becomes the epicenter of the affective staging of trauma and PTSD, prioritizing poetic construction.

Phantom Writing

In this visual essay I present a body of artistic work done within informal urban and suburban heritage sites in Kyoto. Through the media of text, photography, film and site-specific painting, my works from the cycle Spirit Grounds engage with these sites involving material physical aspects as well as beliefs, fictions, and more-than-human beings. Building upon this, I propose ‘phantom writing’ or ‘phantasmography’ as a situated, multidisciplinary and multisensory approach aimed at understanding and designing contemporary places, landscapes and environments, acknowledging and mediating the agency of diverse phantoms and phantasms.

Shifting Baselines: Visualizing Climate Change in America’s National Parks

This visual essay highlights four national parks where the impacts of climate change are well-documented and visually compelling (Everglades, Mesa Verde, Joshua Tree, and Mount Rainier). In drawing attention to these visible climate impacts and effectively interpreting the changes in situ, the park service can play a key role in clarifying the issue of climate change for the American public. Park managers and other park professionals have undoubtedly identified locations in their own management units offering similar opportunities to engage visitors in the science of climate change (either through on-site signage or ranger-led programs). The photographs comprising this visual essay, taken over eight weeks of fieldwork from 2017 to 2024, are intended to spark ideas and move the conversation forward.

Landcare and Landscapes and Accidental Beauty: Failing Digital Technologies and the Gaze of Child Researchers

This visual essay curates an exhibition of photographic data from a project with children about Landcare, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to managing environmental issues in local communities across Australia. The project sought to empower children to engage with Landcare Reserves through participatory arts-based research to map their awareness of and participation in local Landcare Reserve sites. This visual essay recognizes the images as agentic entities, with the power to activate the gaze beyond the boundaries of this project as embedded yet transcendent from it whilst simultaneously acknowledging the ‘failing’ agency of the sensing body of the camera.

#EverydayNile Correspondences

Building on Tim Ingold’s theory on human correspondence, this visual essay plays with the photos of #EverydayNile, a project involving photojournalists from different Nile basin countries to re-picture the river through stories of everyday water practices. # EverydayNile's initial query was: how can we use photos to elicit a conversation and promote shared understandings about the river across countries? The idea of correspondence invites weaving together images from different stories around knots defined by specific photographic elements: focus, composition, time, framing, and light. This visual essay shows how through corresponding we can practice imagination in communication, to create a political community engaged in a dialogic conversation on the river as a common.

Visualizing everydayness, questioning interstitiality

This visual essay explores the possibility of everyday spaces to be theorized as interstices, i.e. in-between or temporary spaces. The images are black-and-white video snapshots of urban spaces in several cities in the German state of Thuringia showing the everyday movement of people and cars, and in some cases, spaces that are used by a limited number of inhabitants. Through these images, the author questions the normal nature of everyday spaces by exploring Rodrigo Vidal’s notion of interfragmentary space, which refers to urban fragments contained within any open space in the city. This article highlights the interplay between everydayness and interstitiality, which can redefine people’s perception of their environment.

Visualising the iconography of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid heroes and heroines in Tshwane (Pretoria), South Africa

Amidst the plethora of statues and monuments constructed as part of the post-apartheid monumental project in Pretoria, photographs of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid heroes and heroines are often used to remember and celebrate the contributions they made to the attainment of the new dispensation. Photographs (presented through statues and monuments) are crucial instruments used in conveying messages about these heroes and heroines, and at the same time denouncing issues of injustice and segregation that were the hallmarks of the colonial and apartheid regimes in Pretoria and South Africa. However, while a vast amount of literature has been published on anti-colonial and anti-apartheid monumentalisation in South Africa, not much attention has been given to iconography of the statues as an aspect that could inform research and understanding of how post-apartheid monumentalisation is not a break with the past, but, rather, a continuation of the pre-1994 practices. Drawing from eight photographs taken from the ‘Long March to Freedom’ statues park at the former Groenkloof Nature Reserve in Pretoria, this visual essay highlights the role played by some of these heroes and heroines at their time. The photographs were taken during two months of research conducted at the park from July to August 2016.

Resilient rebound: a visual essay on materials science researchers confronting plastic pollution in the post-COVID-19 era

In this visual essay, the author embarks on a personal and metaphorical journey on the challenges faced by materials science researchers in the post-COVID-19 era through the lens of their own experiences. Central to this narrative is the ‘cart of dreams and knowledge’, representing the researcher´s academic learnings and aspirational pursuits in hobbies and personal passions. As they confront the ‘garbage monster’ – a metaphor for plastic pollution and escalating environmental crises – their metaphorical carts undergo a transformative journey, representing their resilience and adaptability. This resilient rebound is vividly captured through illustrations integrating historical data, observations and personal experiences as primary data collection tools. These illustrations serve as an analytic device reflecting the researchers’ emotional and academic endeavours during the pandemic. This creative approach introduces an imaginative world while integrating real images within the comic format, grounding these experiences in their personal and professional lives. The essay portraits the author in imaginative worlds, probing their resilience and adaptability, evocative of comic book heroes. By highlighting the collective fight against plastic pollution, the author weaves a tale of hope, innovation, and collaborative spirit, inviting a call to action for a sustainable future in the post-COVID-19 era, thus fostering a sense of empathy and connection with a broader audience.

Tracking transitions: an ethnographic visual study of the manual sand miners in Bihar, India

This ground-breaking visual essay encapsulates a 20-year ethnographic study on manual sand miners in Koilwar, Bihar, India, along the River Sone. Highlighting the participant perspective of the miners, this work is the result of a close collaboration between the miners and the researchers. It traces the evolving lifestyle patterns of manual sand miners in Koilwar – depicting the humble beginnings, a peak phase, and a subsequent gradual decline. It underscores the decline of a once-sustainable manual sand mining culture, sacrificed in the pursuit of advancing the national economy and infrastructure in a developing country like India. This independent study is a collaboration between Puneet Gupta, a photography researcher and faculty member and Ashish Gupta, a documentary photographer. Ashish started photographing sand miners in 2003, and Puneet joined in 2013.

Sindh’s Sadhu Bela: A visual and cultural analysis

ABSTRACT The Sadhu Bela temple in Sukkur, Sindh established by the Udasi community has attracted interest among Pakistani journalists and social scientists. These accounts variously refer to the site as ‘Hindu,’ ‘Sikh,’ or syncretic between the two. In this visual essay, we draw upon texts that the Udasi community has produced to understand the community’s self-definition. We show how Sadhu Bela continues to have significance in the devotional lives of Punjabis and Sindhis across the India-Pakistan border.

Expansion painting: a visual essay

ABSTRACT ‘Expansion Painting: A Visual Essay’ attempts another way of thinking about and through my practice of expansion painting through the form of a visual essay. In Asian art, images and words often come together as one. As can be seen in Chinese ink painting, images and words appear on the same visual plane, suggesting we look equally at both, seeing and reading both image and text. I aim to replicate this equal relationship between images and words in this paper as ‘another’ form of expansion painting. The image/text relationship also aims to reflect the viewers’ ambiguous relationship between their bodies and the work in the installations.