Visual Essay Research Articles

Songs for the Dead

The Last Man - photo by Alan McFetridge Songs of the Dead is a photographic exploration of the aftermath of a devastating fire that impacted the community of Fort McMurray in Alberta Canada on the 3rd of May 2016. Six months after the fire, stimulated by media coverage and reflecting on the discourse surrounding dispossession and the environment, the project commenced at ground level with support of a Royal Photographic Society Environmental Awareness Bursary in a region inhabited by Anishinaabe1 located within Treaty 8 Territory, the traditional lands of the Cree, Dene and unceded territory of the Métis. The visual essay presented here is centred in the wake of a major fire event, however, it is also about human law and ecosystems. By traversing discussions on ethics within documentary photography and briefly exploring the history Aftermath of this medium, we argue how photography can better address socio-ecological issues within climate change through poetics. We offer a way of resisting the norms of documentary photography, resulting from subject and process-driven methods.

Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan, and Aotearoa

This paper introduces “Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan and, Aotearoa,” a special issue of Pacific Arts. It provides background information about the October 2021 online symposium of the same name, which brought together nineteen First Nations artists, filmmakers, and curators, along with non-Indigenous scholars and museum professionals, from Australia, Taiwan, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Philippines. The symposium explored the relationships that First Nations creative practitioners in the Indo-Pacific region have to the land and sea. Each symposium speaker discussed their creative practice in relation to their panel’s theme: history and sovereignty, land and community, site and materials, or place and space. The journal issue comprises written and visual essays, an interview, poetry, and reflective pieces from symposium participants. The contributions are based on the participants’ presentations and have been expanded. While acknowledging the different political, social, and environmental contexts of each contributor, as well as their highly distinctive perspectives and creative approaches, some common themes have emerged in this volume, which the guest editors outline in this introduction. These centre on First Nations Peoples’ complex relationships with land and water as sites of appropriation and struggles for sovereignty, as sources of learning and creative production, and as places of ancestral being and continuous belonging, community, and culture. The introduction provides a brief overview of each contributor’s essay, as well as background on the collaboration between the institutions that convened the symposium: Queensland University of Technology, Taiwan’s National Museum of Prehistory, and Aotearoa’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. It also fleshes out some of the similarities between the countries’ histories, particularly the ongoing effects of colonisation upon their respective First Nations Peoples.

Across Country: Waterlines

This visual essay is an edited transcript of a presentation delivered by Judy Watson given in the 2021 symposium “Grounded in Place: Dialogues Between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan, and Aotearoa.” The artist speaks of her Waanyi Country, near Boodjamulla National Park (Lawn Hill Gorge) in north-west Queensland, Australia, and discusses a number of her artworks that reflect her ongoing investigation into water, massacres, and connections to Country.

Nightgown parties

‘Nightgown parties’ is an experimental visual essay featuring a new fairy tale and previously unpublished images, a three-way collaborative ‘party’ between an artist, writer and curator. The curator, Catriona McAra, begins with a compact, comparative preface for the imaginative practices of the artist and writer which intersect at the lost moment of fairy-tale costume. Writer Kate Bernheimer has prepared a new story, ‘The Crown of Stars’ about a found photograph from artist Samantha Sweeting’s childhood, Golden Crown, in which the 4-year-old artist wears fancy dress and appears to be dancing with abandon. McAra argues that, for both, the fairy-tale costume functions as primary matter, with close reference to well-known tales that feature articles of clothing such as Charles Perrault’s ‘Peau d’Âne’ (‘Donkeyskin’), ‘Cinderella’, and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. McAra’s context for this new tale and image brings together fairy-tale scholarship and costume studies.

"La sofisticación de la pérdida": Usos y abusos de la fotografía en la obra de Eduardo Lalo

This article focuses on a series of visual essays in the literary production of the Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo (1960): Los pies de San Juan (2002), donde (2005), and El deseo del lápiz (2010). We analyze these books in chronological order, regarding them as a unit in evolution, an organic sequence that meticulously builds, develops, and alters a way of looking. If Los pies de San Juan represents the claustrophobic experience of the physical city of San Juan, donde transforms this experience into a condition and projects it outwards to a conceptual space that imbues everything around the speaker. In El deseo del lápiz this "conditioned" way of dwelling is taken to its extreme by suggesting prison can be interpreted as a synecdoche of all these previous experiences. By exploring fissures in the hegemonic models of visuality (in the physical, conceptual-epistemological, and institutional levels), Lalo's work blurs the imaginary line of "the distribution of the sensible" (Rancière). This means that by combining the visual experimentation of photography with the conceptual-epistemological exploration of the text, Lalo conceives a new aesthetic community that presents bodies with another way of experiencing their daily reality. At the same time, we analyze the tension created by the constant, perhaps unintended irruption of the self-referential authorial voice within the texts.

Hierarchies of Feeling Structures of Sentiment and Refusal

This collection of works takes the form of a visual essay, an attempt to further explore ideas and themes found in Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021), which presents unfeeling as a method for disrupting colonialism and other oppressive hierarchies. This collection of images comprises a series of digitally rendered collages that encourage and value uncertainty and mystery. The images in this series are speculative, abstract and non-linear, created in ‘opposition to clarity’, with the intention to reflect the idea of ‘unfeeling’ by withholding or refusing easy understanding.

Knitting Close to the Edge

This visual essay focuses on hand knitting, environment and activism through examples from The Knitting Map (2005) in Cork, Ireland, Romy Owens’ Unbearable Absence of Landscapes (2015) in Tulsa, Oklahoma and The Tempestry Project’s National Parks Project (2016), across the US. The essay re-imagines the knotting of knitting as political dissent through a focus on edges and edginess. Such edges relate to these works in multiple ways - through the materiality of knitting as object (material edges), processual and contextual quality (edginess) as well as their engagement with communities, urban / rural environments and climate. Playfulness and joy as methodology attend this essay through documentation, critical strategy and performative writing.

The Residency as Diagram

For the month of October 2021, a group of nineteen artists from around the world convened for the online residency ‘Place, People and Time: Wild Ways’, hosted by The Walking Library (Misha Myers and Dee Heddon) and The Museum of Loss and Renewal (Tracy Mackenna and Edwin Janssen). Diagrammatic methods and online collaborative tools were used throughout the residency as a means not only to understand, share and translate different ways that the group held shared global time and space together, but also to mediate connection between one another in virtual and geographic space. This visual essay considers the diagrammatic methods used throughout the residency, which drew upon and extended further the existing practices of both The Walking Library project and The Museum of Loss and Renewal.

Applying health design thinking to uncover actors in the sustenance of health and wellbeing during hotel quarantine in kuwait

This visual essay centers on the author’s hotel quarantine experience in Kuwait. While many quarantine stories have been recorded, personal stories involving the relationship between human and non-human actors within a quarantined space are still overlooked. By focusing on the maintenance of health and wellness during quarantine, this essay visually communicates the hotel quarantine experience by using a health design thinking approach. By presenting a series of photographs, actors’ interactions, and journey maps, the author attempts to convey a connection between human and non-human actors during quarantine, and prompts a discussion on what can be done to improve hotel quarantine systems in the future.

Guided Into a World Unknown: Reflections on the Making of a Visual Essay With Refugees

The constant presence of refugees in the media has constructed its own reality, at the expense of lived reality. Any work concerned with refugees’ lived experience will need to find ways to encourage people to see beyond this discourse. Based on research with refugees placed in depopulating villages in Italy, this article follows the process of collaboratively creating a visual essay that reflects the lived reality of refugee participants. The essay’s aim is to let readers share in an experience, rather than merely documenting that of others. This article reflects on efforts to achieve this through experimenting with the essay’s form, poetics and aesthetics. In doing so, the article discusses an alternative way of communicating research and presenting a visual essay.

Pinboarding the Pandemic: Experiments in Representing Autoethnography

This visual essay draws on an autoethnographic study to present snapshots of mundane academic practice during the pandemic, using these to reflect on care and care practices within academia. Our approach is inspired by a “pinboard” (Law 2007): we use an echo of the two-dimensional space the pinboard offers to present our material through logics of juxtaposition and resonance, rather than attempting to craft a linear argument.

Design and repair: from object conservation to material transformation

This visual essay utilizes a series of images from Make Do and Mend, a participatory workshop that brought together designers, a museum conservator and the general public to explore design for repair as part of Sydney Craft Week in 2019. The photographs capture objects and materials in various states of transformation, bringing to light the aesthetic politics at play that often underpin acts of repair. The essay is a visual re-framing of repair as a form of design practice, revealing objects in various states of transformation and our changing attitudes towards them over time. As a visual narrative, the essay demonstrates the value of material knowledge exchange in shaping new aesthetic registers for object conservation and approaches to repair.

Visual essay: inês, the divine relict

This visual essay investigates the language encoded by the clothing represented in the epic tales and narratives about D. Inês de Castro and D. Pedro I, highlighting the tomb effigies, legends and chronicles related to the theme, analyzing the visual and symbolic codes belonging to these, as well as the memories associated with iconography. It presents the performance as a dressed language, how and which codes we can reveal of the character through the costume scene.

Showing Up: A Creative Reflection on Ritualization for Art Educators

This creative reflection looks thoughtfully at the act of ritualization as a potential pedagogical tool towards letting go of more outcome-based processes and releasing predetermined expectations. Stemming from the authors repeated actions of showing up to the canvas daily, this visual essay explores the possibility that ritualization may resituate the self and allow for new understandings to present themselves in an emergent way. Using personal experience as the starting point, the essay asks how ritualizing the act of art-making without predetermined outcomes, may impact art educators and their practice.

At the Borderland of History

Abstract Drawing on field observations in Dandong and Sinuiju, corresponding border cities in China and North Korea, respectively, this extended visual essay meditates on the mutual imbrication of landscape and history in this border-contact zone. Whereas Chinese soldiers and tourists passing through Dandong once used North Korea—real or imagined—as the photographic backdrop to construct their socialist imageries from comradeship to the industrializing future, mainland tourists today regard North Korea as an economic and political failure vis-à-vis China's high-speed growth. Aside from being a trade hub, Dandong has become a giant theme park for those who seek to consume everything North Korean. Meanwhile, amid the sense of Chinese superiority over their neighboring country on the other side of the Yalu River, China's own past, much like the murky river that divides the two historic port cities, has become more disarticulated than ever.

Gazing through the window: A participatory Covid-19-exhibition for a nation in crisis

This visual essay focuses on the digital exhibition ‘Hold Still. A portrait of our Nation in 2020’ by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Regarding a visual social analysis of the Covid-19-pandemic, two main aspects are relevant: first, the project shows new modes of image creation, collection, and presentation. Based on a public call for pictures with more than 31 000 submissions, people contributed to the visualization of the pandemic. Second, 100 images were selected and exhibited in the form of a photoblog. This compilation constitutes a specific way of seeing a nation in crisis. The exhibition depicts one object – the window – as an important symbol of the pandemic. In the form of image sets, three main categories will be presented: (1) on an aesthetic level, the window is used as a specific picture frame; (2) creating an outside and an inside, a particular form of window gaze is established, and (3) the window functions as a specific communicative medium – a connecting divider – that establishes a shared space while dividing it simultaneously. In conclusion, the photoblog can be understood as a specific form of iconic image cluster. By juxtaposing the images in the blog regarding similarities and differences, a new meaning is established. Their combination symbolizes the individual’s friction between proximity and distance, showing persons in the in-between. Instead of displaying states of personal distress, the image compilation depicts the collective struggle in a crisis, thereby establishing new forms of imagined communities.

STUDENT'S LEARNING STYLES AND STRATEGIES IN MASTERING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE : A CLASSROOM BASED RESEARCH IN SMA NEGERI SIWALIMA

Abstract : Learning styles are placed as the important role for students and it is the key to students success in learning. Therefore, students really need to recognize their learning styles that are appropriate to themselves to figure out their learning strategies that lead them to their learning objectives that can be effectively achieved. This study is aimed at describing; 1) the learning styles on XI grade students at SMA Negeri Siwalima , 2) the learning strategies of XI grade students at SMA Negeri Siwalima, and 3) the impact of students’ learning styles and their learning strategies in mastering English language of XI grade students at SMA Negeri Siwalima.
 Descriptive qualitative study design which is supported with visual essay was used to conduct the data. 28 students were involved as the participants of the study Some instruments were applied namely classroom observation, field notes, in-depth interview and review documents to collect the data and it was analyzed by using triangulation method.
 The results of the study show that (1) the learning styles of XI grade students at SMA Negeri Siwalima are visual learners, auditory learners and kinesthetic learners. Most students have learning styles as Kinesthetic learners (15 students), follow by auditory learners (10 students) and visual learners (3 students). The purpose of using learning styles is to find the best ways for both students to learn effectively and teachers to teach efficiently. (2) The students use varied learning strategies based on their learning styles. Each learning styles has different learning strategies as well as the strengths and weaknesses. (3) There are close relationship between students’ learning styles, their learning strategies and their learning achievement particularly in mastering English language. The more the students know about their learning styles and learning strategies, the better they will have improvement in mastering English language.

‘Foodstagramming’ in early 20th-century postcards: a transhistorical perspective

Introduced in 1907, the ‘real photo’ postcard destabilized the boundaries between private and public life, enabling people to perform identity in ways that anticipate contemporary social media practices. In this visual essay, the author explores one particular phenomenon – the sharing of food – drawing comparisons with ‘foodstagramming’ in terms of its compositional structure, social objectives and communicative functions. In doing so, she challenges the supposed novelty of modes of self-presentation on social media, embedding them in a broader historical trajectory.

Whakapapa Plotting

Aotearoa New Zealand has a rich history of pre-colonial architectural design embedded in Indigenous Māori knowledge — a unique oceanic cultural spatial sensibility. Whenua (land) activates a metaphysical exchange between people, ocean, and atmosphere to grow the spatial sensibility into an intangible interconnected blueprint for design. Despite possessing a vast body of environment-specific knowledge embedded in centuries of experience, the dynamic spirit of existing Māori architecture stands in sharp contrast to the hermetic design systems brought ashore during the nineteenth-century British colonisation of Aotearoa that inhibited further development of our Māori spatial kaupapa (approach). How can Aotearoa designers uphold the mana (prestige) of Māori cultural spatial sensibilities when designing within the dominant Pākēha (New Zealand European) industry today? This visual essay has been created from the perspective of a Māori spatial designer. It foregrounds the need for all Aotearoa designers to honour the philosophical spatial mātauranga (knowledge) crafted by our tīpuna (ancestors). We have a responsibility to breathe life into these skills so our tamariki (children) can thrive in spatial environments without Indigenous erasure.

Ghost Written

This visual essay presents a feminist counter-fiction to the likely fictional narratives the media has used to describe Sarah Winchester’s reclusive life in the labyrinthine mansion she designed for herself in the Santa Clara Valley, California (1886–1922). Given Winchester’s continual construction of uninhabited rooms in that house and given her decision to offer no explanation for her designs, the media has projected narratives of haunting and madness onto Winchester and her house. Without dismissing the possibility of those readings, our feminist counter-fiction does not presume to assign a specific meaning to Winchester’s designs. Instead, we ghost-write two soundtracks along the edges of filmstrips that trans-mediate the narratives of so-called yellow journalism and of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story of haunting and madness, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), into the sepia tones of early cinematic imagery. Specifically, we visualise Winchester as a media construct and the media’s fabulation about the columns in Winchester’s house and about her would-be seance room, where the public apparently saw nothing more than a woman’s silhouette projected onto a curtained window. While we offer nothing to penetrate that curtain, which we have trans-mediated to a cinematic screen that divides us from her interiority, we see traces of objects and a shadow ostensibly tracing a pattern from behind the curtain. Thus, we draw inspiration from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s uncanny ability to ghost-write the hymenal curtain/screen between Jacques Derrida’s labyrinthine columns of text. Tolling the bell of Derrida’s Glas, this essay positions Winchester’s pendular body in a space where the interiority of her designing pleasure eludes representation because that pleasure is not dependent on the reproduction of meaning. We pastiche certain forms from the Winchester House, but these forms, akin to the impossibility of Gilman’s yellow wallpaper, do not amount to the meaning of a total design.