Visual Statements Research Articles

Italian and French responses to Urban V’s visual communications, c.1368–1420

ABSTRACT This article explores the visual responses (with political, spiritual and social connotations) to the visual statements about the role of Rome and the pope in Western Christendom made by Pope Urban V (1362–1370) at the time of his return to the Urbe from Avignon in 1367–9. It investigates the plurality of responses to these papal statements, the chain of further visual communications that these statements set in motion as well as their longue durée by engaging with the reception of the pontiff’s powerful messages by different audiences, both secular and ecclesiastic, from Rome to the Italian peninsula more broadly, and southern France, in the following 50 years.

Conceptualizing the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art form

This paper attempts to conceptualize the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances through the aesthetic lenses of performance art. The expressiveness of performance art forms is frequently praised for the emotions we have toward them. These feelings are derived from the symbolic connotations and functionalities of the arts in life. Through an exploratory design of qualitative inquiry, the researchers focus on a contextual dialogue on the aesthetic visual presentations of selected contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art forms. The critical content analysis of music videos was espoused to examine the stylistic body movements and gestures coded in some contemporary Ghanaian dances such as Azonto, Twerking, Kupe, Pilolo and Shoo as part of an empirical artistic study. Instruments for data collection were observation, document analysis and photography for the contextual visual content analyses grounded in semiotic and aesthetic theoretical discourse. This study again relied heavily on secondary data from recorded communication including music videos, books, transcripts, websites, newspaper articles, journal articles and the like to make objective inferences. The findings indicate that dance is the communication that occurs via the conduit of the dancer's body that ruptures individuals' independent existence and generates a sense of finitude. Whereas some of the dances make aggressively erotic visual statements, others are mere expressive gestural and body movements to simply entertain a targeted audience. The result further shows that, the contemporary Ghanaian dance performances transcend beyond mere entertainment but rather are an embodiment of body language emerging from the indigenous dance symbolisms. Teaching learners to perceive visual aesthetic qualities and symbolic interpretations in dance performances will deepen the appreciation of Ghanaian dance performances not just as entertainment but as another medium for expression to transmit their inherent messages. It is suggested that, these dance forms should be formalized as indigenous knowledge in a quest to blend tradition with modernity in our creative endeavours. This knowledge should be propagated through creative arts education in Ghanaian schools. Other performance art components displayed in contemporary Ghanaian dances including body painting, facial expressions, costumology and fashion accessories present another lacuna for further research by future researchers. Key words: aesthetics, dance, therapy, performance art, body, movement

Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

Imágenes de la realidad y la ficción; lecturas ficcionales de la comunicación visual

El articulo presenta un análisis de las imágenes fotográficas que han circulado durante los primeros meses de 2020, principalmente, en la web sobre a la pandemia COVID-19, a través de las cuáles hemos aprendido un discurso visual sobre este suceso histórico pues nos han mostrado enunciados visuales que articulan cómo se ve esta nueva realidad mundial.

Fraturas contemporâneas de histórias indígenas em Belém: sobre mármores e grafites

Neste artigo, considerando como referência teórico-metodológicas os estudos do discurso fundamentados em Michel Foucault e as definições de dispositivo colonial e etniCidades para compreender os enunciados visuais espraiados nas paisagens de Belém na segunda década do século XXI, que representam diferentes lugares de enunciação sobre a história da cidade e os povos indígenas. Tomo o frontal da Basílica de Nazaré e uma escultura de bronze de um indígena exposta na praça de um bairro nobre da cidade para marcar o discurso da colonização e, em contrapartida, analiso grafites de dois artistas contemporâneos paraenses que retomam a memória indígena de Belém em suas produções e visibilizam a pluralidade étnica da cidade. De certa forma, atualizo a antiga metáfora cunhada pelo Pe. Antônio Vieira, mas agora, em oposição ao mármore, não mais a murta e sim os grafites e sua efemeridade.

An Expanded Understanding of Art as an Agent of Change in Higher Education

South African higher education institutions seek strategies to address belonging and decolonization. The student protest movement across South African university campuses during 2015–2016 further underlined this fact. We explored the capacity of interactive artworks to address belonging and active citizenship, both prioritized by university management. Art, in this sense, facilitates out-of-classroom education to aid the institutional decolonial vision of a university entrenched in colonial history and apartheid. Furthermore, the protests challenged the slow pace of institutional change at South African universities. This article examines responses to an interactive artwork placed on the Stellenbosch University campus. Our elastic understanding of art and education deviates from traditional art history and acts as a critical public intervention that aimed to stimulate conversation about belonging at Stellenbosch University. The employed research methods are informed by the decolonial framework which engages a crucial attentiveness of the power issues embedded in knowledge production, validation and dissemination. An interactive public artwork, titled “We Belong Here”, was placed on the main campus of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. We invited students on campus to make visual statements related to topics such as community, apathy, legacy, honour, protest, ethical conduct and creativity. Qualitative data was gathered from individual and group interviews with students, lecturers and staff members who were most likely to have encountered the artwork. Theories on critical citizenship education, and art education informed the research and discussion. The data suggests that art education in the expanded field has the potential to aid higher education institutions in bringing about personal and intellectual growth. Both accepting and dismissive opinions were raised by participants and welcomed by the researcher. Viewing their voice among many, led some to a sense of belonging in the university community, and their interaction led them to converse with others on the topic of citizenship. There was also criticism to the artwork text written in English, and concern that such a work could not create any relevant impact. Although the parameters of the artwork is limited within the field, the student protest movement was a forceful reminder of urgent matters in higher education and a reason to continue enquiry and interventions to decolonialize education.

‘Like Seeing Normal Life’: children’s opera Brundibár in Theresienstadt (1943–1944) and the power of scenographic metaphors

ABSTRACTCzech architect-scenographer František Zelenka was a well-known pre-war designer for the National Theatre in Prague, deported by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt ghetto, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where he participated extensively in the inmates’ theatrical activity. Among his works in the ghetto, the children’s opera Brundibár, designed and directed by Zelenka, stands out. Brundibár was originally created in 1938 by the Czech Jewish composer Hans Krása and the librettist Adolf Hoffmeister in Prague. Despite the harsh living conditions, 55 performances are known to have been held in Theresienstadt between 1943 and 1944. The staging of Brundibár consisted of visual statements that were an integral part of the scenography and acquired meaning in the context of the ghetto. This article analyses Zelenka’s scenography by focusing on the visual metaphors embedded in the stage images he created, and offers an insight on the multiple roles of Brundibár’s original scenography and its impact. The aim is to underscore the power in creating and reading scenographic images under coercive conditions, with Brundibár as a paradigmatic example. It demonstrates the ways in which scenography may serve as a reminder of normality for children dealing with issues that cannot otherwise be confronted. The article concludes with a brief commentary on contemporary adaptations of the opera.

Worth a thousand words? Visual concept mapping of the quality of life of people with severe mental health problems.

ObjectivesConventional approaches to quality of life (QoL) measurement rely heavily on verbal, language‐based communication. They require respondents to have significant cognitive and verbal ability, making them potentially unsuitable for people with severe mental health problems. To facilitate an alternative approach to QoL assessment, the current study aims to develop an alternative, visual representation of QoL for people with severe mental health problems.MethodsAn alternative, visual adaptation of the concept mapping method was used to construct this visual representation of QoL. Eighty‐two participants (i.e., patients, care professionals, and family members) contributed to this study. Results were processed statistically to construct the concept map.ResultsThe concept map contains 160 unique visual statements, grouped into 8 clusters labelled (1) Support and Attention, (2) Social Contacts, (3) Happiness and Love, (4) Relaxation and Harmony, (5) Leisure, (6) Lifestyle, (7) Finances, and (8) Health and Living. Examples of visual statements are pictures of family silhouettes, romantic couples, natural scenes, houses, sports activities, wallets and coins, smiley faces, and heart shapes. The clusters were interpreted and labelled by participants.ConclusionsAlmost all of the statements correspond to clusters found in previous (non‐visual) QoL research. Hence, QoL domains can also be presented visually.

Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney

Reviewed by: Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel by Michael A. Chaney Anna Poletti (bio) Michael A. Chaney. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel. UP of Mississippi, 2017, 195 pp. ISBN 978-1496810250, $65.00. Many of us who study and teach life writing have found the rise of the memoir in comics form an exciting phenomenon to observe. Across literary and cultural studies, influential texts such as Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis have prompted a renewed interest in accounting for the unique power of autobiographical storytelling and presented scholars with the challenge of reckoning with a new textual form. Michael A. Chaney's Reading Lessons in Seeing sits at the intersection of a media-specific theory of comics and the study of [End Page 399] autobiography, arguing that reading autobiographical comics requires more—from critics, teachers, students, and readers—than a glancing familiarity with the complexities of life writing or the comics form. Chaney demonstrates that in reading autobiographical comics we learn to read anew. Chaney's central premise is that comics themselves teach us how to read them. These pedagogical moments are staged using a range of techniques Chaney elucidates across five chapters concerned with mirror scenes, the figure of the child, games and other non-narrative forms of play, extradiegetic panels that present the comic autobiographer at work, and the possibility of communitas that reckons with the history of racial violence. Reading Lessons in Seeing is full of careful, nuanced, and revelatory close readings that demonstrate how the combination of the comics form with autobiographical content generates an entirely distinct textual encounter. One of the strengths of this approach is that these chapters focus on moments of braiding between the diegetic and extradiegetic fields of the text in which the autobiographical acts as a punctum and as chimera. In my experience of teaching autobiographical comics, these are the moments to which the strongest and most engaged students are drawn when introduced to autobiographical comics in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Such students want to understand what is communicated by Art Speigelman's self-portrait where he sits at his drawing table wearing a mouse mask with the bodies of dead mice at his feet and a guard tower out his window. Chaney's work helps us read such moments, which are undeniably compelling yet difficult to describe. His book will be a valuable resource for teaching, and for supporting the independent research projects of undergraduate and graduate students. In these readings Chaney teaches us how to identify and consider the seemingly impossible balance comic autobiographers strike between artifice and truth. The grounding of the book in Chaney's own teaching reminds us of the importance of the classroom as a space for the scholar to think and learn alongside their students. In this work it leads to numerous clarifications of the complex work of form and genre, positing comics as, among other things, "a set of self-reflexive, visual statements uttering life and inner life in brazenly non-realistic tones" (25). In his close readings that support statements such as the one above, Chaney utilizes Gillian Whitlock's conceptualization of "autographics" and Hillary Chute's careful examination of women's comics in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. The scholarly originality comes from connecting these theories directly to psychoanalysis in order to argue for the formal specificity of comics. In his chapter on mirror scenes, framed perhaps unsurprisingly by Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "formal operations of the medium, as well as its formal unconscious" are considered to analyze "not just [End Page 400] the subjects talked about in graphic novels but the models of subjectivity that do the talking" (25). While the exploration of a text's unconscious may put off those readers who dismiss the utility of a psychoanalytic approach, Chaney convinced me of the generative possibilities for interpretation and reading such a frame can yield. For Chaney, the form of comics refers to "the method rather than the content of comics" (7)—and thus what the method displaces, as well as what it makes explicit, must be accounted for. Chaney's...

Sex and Cancer: opening difficult therapeutic conversations and challenging assumptions using Design Activism-language outside the comfort zone

ABSTRACT Evidence shows sexual and relationship problems are common following cancer, producing distress for patients. Patients and health professional surveys clearly show both groups have difficulties discussing sexual problems. Patients report feeling guilty and disempowered, and health professionals report feeling anxious and inadequately skilled, leading to poor assessment and treatment. Our socio-cultural understanding sees sex as private, but also one most susceptible to social influence. The sense of sexual self (sexual identity) develops from cultural and religious understanding, learning from significant adults with whom we live and life experiences. ComMA (Communication Medicine and Art), working through design activism have trialled the use of art textile as a metaphor, an alternative language for patient's words. They created visual statements to challenge these notions at experiential workshops within two International Conferences on Sexuality and Cancer. Outcome: The clinicians’ evaluations have shown the workshops were able to challenge, and reflections from the experience suggested health professionals felt better equipped to talk about sex with patients. This paper looks at the background to the work, processes involved, pilot studies results and considers the next stage: research involving developing a visual communication in collaboration with patients, to challenge both health professionals and patients alike to empower therapeutic conversations.

An efficient fast-response content-based image retrieval framework for big data

In this paper, an efficient fast-response content-based image retrieval (CBIR) framework based on Hadoop MapReduce is proposed to operate stably with high performance targeting big data. It provides a novel bag of visual words (BOVW) technique based on a proposed chain-clustering binary search-tree (CC-BST) algorithm to build the visual statements for representing the image. As well, it introduces a proposed methodology for creating representatives for these visual statements as a solution for big-data' high-dimensionality. Further, those representatives are utilized to provide an indexing scheme for building one large file as an input for Hadoop. Moreover, an efficient-MapReduce technique is presented to exploit the created visual-representatives of the images to retrieve the top-relevant images for the input query. Empirical tests for the proposed techniques outperform the state-of-art compared techniques.

The Gown Must Go To Town

This article reviews the “The Gown Must Go to Town” exhibition staged in the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra, highlighting its theme as well as the Afrocentric philosophical messaging of the exhibits. Centered on the dynamism of the city, the exhibits carried conceptual information tailored to comment on the disastrous environmental consequences of the twenty-first century inventive technological hardware, fibers, and plastic waste (and its mismanagement) that plagues the city. It made powerful visual statements, in an artistic way, of how to control these problems. However, I argue that because of the limitations placed on Ghana, Ghanaian art should pay more focused attention on industrial art instead of conceptual art. This review by no means brands conceptual art as inferior to industrialized art, but it maintains that it is through a focus on industrial art that the nation could meet its own functional and decorative needs, and cease doing so by extensive importation. This argument is based on the fact that conceptual art took its root from Africa in a non-academic format that has long been practiced in the continent for centuries, and therefore not an emergent art in the African artistic milieu—as it is perceived to be.

Interview with Director Richard Beecham

Richard Beecham's theater includes eclectic credits from Dancing at Lughnasa, In Praise of Love, Humble Boy (Royal & Derngate, Northampton), Red Light Winter, In a Garden, Henry IVPart I (Theatre Royal, Bath), as well as various productions at Salisbury Playhouse, Northcott Theatre Exeter, and the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. Beecham also curates large cultural events such as the National Commemorative Event for Holocaust Memorial Day at Newcastle Theatre Royal. I sat down to interview him just prior to the March 2015 opening of The Crucible Theatre's revival of Arthur Miller's stage version of Playing for Time, with Siân Phillips.David Smith: Am I right in assuming this is your first Miller production?Richard Beecham: That's correct; however I did actually meet him once. I was an undergraduate at Oxford between 1992 and 1995, and in 1995 Arthur Miller was announced as the visiting drama professor. At the time I was a member of the OWLS-the Oxford University Dramatic Society-who were very excited with the news, and invited him to a drinks party. This party was to be held the night before my finals exam. I was behind with my revision, so all I remember is shaking his hand. This enormous man, with big bear hands; he gave off this aura, a charisma, but I just had to run, so that was my one experience with the great man.DS: I was wondering how you and the cast were reacting to the text of the play?RB: It is obviously a very challenging subject matter and everyone in the room comes to it with their own personal story I am Jewish, so I have my own personal connections. We have a number of Jewish actors in the cast; a couple of them have very direct stories, and others just have general awareness. So we have immersed ourselves in research. I drove all the cast crackers, insisting they read this, visit this exhibition there, please watch this, etc. Then of course you get into rehearsal. So now you have to think, we have done that, and now we have to study Miller's play. So I made sure all the actors had read Fania's memoir, as it was Miller's one and only source. We then considered what choices Miller had made-what he had taken or left out of the memoir-and asked the question why he may have made those decisions. That was a very interesting exercise, and further complicated by the fact that Miller had originally written it a screenplay. Having studied and watched the screenplay, there are not huge changes, but obviously there are some due to moving from film to theater.DS: Due to the development from screen to the theater, I was wondering how you were actually going to stage the play? Miller was quite adamant that the play should be seen as a "demonstration," there were to be no unnecessary "adornments."RB: In my opinion every word the playwright writes, whether in the text, stage direction, or a foreword, it is worth probably its weight in gold. But every director has to try to meet the requirements within the theater in which he is producing it. In this case we have a good match, Crucible has a big epic space, and we have a very big cast. It is not a proscenium arch theater-Miller wouldn't want that-so in terms of staging we have created a very epic, open, stripped-back, dark theater space, which we hope is not literally, but metaphorically evocative of the landscape of the play. We are not trying to recreate Auschwitz on the stage. That would not be possible, and if it were, it would not be desirable. We have also been very careful to avoid cliche, so there is no barbed wire or tiered bunks. Those we have really tried to pare back on, so when we are making any visual statements they are very considered. There are some things we felt we had to include, like the yellow stars, the striped uniforms, the kapos, and so on.DS: Of course sound effects are critical to building the atmosphere; machine gun fire in the middle of an orchestral piece, for example.RB: Exactly, I think that the soundscape of the production does carry a lot of the building of the world, creating another attack on the senses of the audience. …

Fashionable Curiosities: Extreme Footwear as Wearable Fantasies

This paper considers extreme shoes and the visual statements they make about contemporary society, women and femininity. It argues that extreme shoes are puzzling yet charming objects, epitomizing a spectacle-centered society: they are part of unexpected, personal performances, which blend the boundaries of fashion and art and allow the wearers to shift from an ordinary “self” to the extraordinary “other.”

MapReduce based Big Data Framework for Content Searching of Surveillance System Videos

CBIR systems go through sets of stages starting from acquiring the new images, representing these images by extracting the image features, describing the key features and eventually computing the similarity distances to get the most relevant results responding to the query image. In this paper, ICBIR an integrated CBIR Hadoop-MapReduce based framework which is split into both offline and online phases is introduced. Visual statements are built using the extracted interest points SIFTs. Later on, these visual statements are used to estimate the similarity distances which in turn are used to create the image dataset clusters. A huge vocabulary of SIFTs describing the interest points of the image is constructed. In this paper, the authors are interested in routing protocols based on clusters that aim to reduce congestion in order to have reliable data transmission and a reduced loss rate. This is achieved by balancing the traffic load, which results into a balanced energy consumption within the network.

Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times by Richard J. Smith (review)

RICHARD J. SMITH, Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times. Asia’s Transformations/ Critical Asian Scholarship. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. xvi, 270 pp. £29.99, US$53.95 (pb). ISBN 978-0-415-68510-8 Richard Smith’s new book is a collection of six essays, chosen, as the author suggests in his introduction, to represent major cornerstones of his past research. The essays, therefore, are not identical with his previous work, but rather updated or reexamined versions of previously published articles and book chapters. The book thus provides—to use a metaphor related to some of its themes—a set of coordinates that allows the reader to navigate through the author’s research interests and prolific publications. This ‘‘set of coordinates’’ is comprised of the Yijing 易經 (Classic of Changes), cartography, ritual, tradition/modernity, divination, and the Jesuits. Although the book purports to deal with ‘‘late imperial times’’ (‘‘from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries,’’ p. 48), it ventures well beyond the late imperial, both before and after the empire. Thus, after the general introduction to the book and its relation to Smith’s biography, the first chapter, ‘‘The Languages of the Yijing and the Presentation of Reality,’’ begins with an analysis of the origins of the Yijing during the Zhou 周 dynasty and ends with twentieth-century receptions of the text. This chapter serves as an excellent overview of the Yijing, giving examples of the text and its uses, and emphasizing its importance in China’s ancient history, culture, and philosophy, as well as in its more recent past. Smith highlights the Yijing’s role in creating ‘‘a comprehensive vision of reality,’’ as well as in providing ‘‘a working model of cosmic change’’ enabling its users to ‘‘fathom the cosmos’’ (p. 33). Chapter 1 can easily be used as a reading assignment for undergraduate introductory classes, and the included diagrams illustrate quite well Smith’s flowing discussion of the Yijing. The many comparisons with the Bible can perhaps assist also a Western undergraduate to relate better to the Yijing. Chapter 2, ‘‘Mapping China’s World,’’ concentrates on cartography, especially world maps in late imperial times. Smith suggests that world maps are a useful tool for understanding ‘‘Chinese conceptions of the world’’ (p. 48), both in the sense of how Chinese thought about others and the way they thought about themselves, within the larger context of the world. Smith presents the multifaceted and multilayered nature of Chinese world maps along with their cultural background and implications, emphasizing the limited influence of Jesuit cartography and the lasting significance of the ‘‘Sinocentric’’ (p. 69) tributary system. As Smith puts it, ‘‘[world maps] were designed primarily as visual statements about a great and glorious culture, a universal order focused squarely on the Chinese tributary system’’ (p. 65). Clearly, the maps that Smith examines are of great interest. It is, however, unfortunate that the quality of the figures is such that one can hardly see any details. The first two chapters, dealing with the Yijing and cartography, thus discuss ways of bringing order, or comprehending order, in chronological and geographical terms. The third chapter, ‘‘Ritual in Qing Culture,’’ complements the first two by addressing order systems in the society (broadly conceived), the state, and the cosmos. It was thus, as the author correctly argues and demonstrates, that ‘‘in Ming and Qing times ritual continued to be a matter of extraordinary importance’’ (p. 91). Smith surveys the ‘‘theory and practice’’ of ‘‘orthodox ritual’’ along with the various forms and levels of rituals during the 126 BOOK REVIEWS Qing. He focuses on ‘‘state sacrifices and domestic life-cycle ritual’’ (pp. 98–103), which he takes to ‘‘reflect two of the most powerful symbols or metaphors in Chinese sociopolitical vocabulary, the bureaucracy and the family’’ (p. 98). Smith ends the chapter with a short discussion of heterodox and heretic rituals and a more general analysis of the significance of ritual in Chinese society and culture, with an eye to its fate in the modern era. This fate is examined in the following chapter, ‘‘The Teachings of Ritual and the Rectification of Customs: Echos [sic] of Tradition in the Political...

Construction of the World Design Capital: Détournement of Spectacle in Dongdaemun Design Park & Plaza in Seoul

This paper analyzes how the city government-led project to promote Seoul as the world design capital has resulted in the construction of spectacular architecture, and how such a vision of Seoul is resisted by various actors. Construction of the Dongdaemun Design Park and Plaza, designed by Zaha Hadid, is an effort to rebrand Seoul′s image from that of an industrial city relying on manufacturing to that of a post-industrial city emphasizing service industries. Although Hadid′s design, which integrates the historical wall from the Chosun dynasty, was deemed respectful of Korean heritage by the city government, many sports fans, street vendors, and artists have criticized it as representing a continuation of the developmentalist project. By highlighting the controversial design campaign of the FF group, this paper illustrates how the technique of détournement, proposed by Guy Debord, the founding member of the Situationist International, can be used to undermine the spectacle generated by the star architect′s design. Despite the tendency of dramatic visual statements to stifle the struggles of everyday life, the case of Dongdaemun shows that the potential for critical design still exists.

Vision and Representation: Photography in Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City

Since its rise in the late 1850s, photography, as an art form, has attracted equal measures of praise and scorn from critics: on the one hand its tangible proximity to real life and unmatched recording abilities seemed to herald new era in artistic representation; on the other, it was seen as an inferior art form to painting, where specific training was required, and where the aesthetic and moral values of the artist were more readily apparent. Almost hundred years later, the establishment of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (in 1940, under the curatorship of Edward Steichen) reflected the increasing dominance of those voices arguing for photography to be recognized as legitimate form of art. Yet even this institutional confirmation did not settle the original debate about photography's inherent investment in reality, and the question of whether it was a mere simulacrum or mirror image of visual (Nochlin qtd. in Wells 258). In 1975, the new curator of the Photography Department at MoMA, John Szarkowski wrote piece defending this contested form as a different kind of art, arguing that the goal of photography was to reveal the private vision of the photographer, and reflect an individualized interpretation of reality, rather than mechanical documentation of it. For Szarkowski, the perception of the photographer was central in producing an aesthetic effect; the true substance of photograph is not [it] is of, [but] what it is about. Nevertheless, for all the respect that photography has garnered in many quarters as subjective art form, it retains certain reputation as simplifying force, complement or clarification to more ostensibly personal and interpretative art forms--including literature. In On Photography, Susan Sontag makes clear distinction between writing and photographing, suggesting that: What is written about person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are homemade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire (4). Advocates of photography argue against this view (Sontag herself would eventually retract it), insisting that the interpretation of the photographic image--as with any other form of visual art--does not solely belong to the artist, but is rather collaborative act that involves the viewer. Though separated temporally, the gazes of the artist and the viewer fall upon the same object to construe meaning. Therefore, we are justified in asking questions about the wisdom or even the efficacy of including photographs as complements to literary texts--not least because growing number of literary authors interested in photography are asking precisely the same questions. With this premise in mind, I will in the following discussion analyze particular literary work that challenges the notion of photography as static medium, work that includes photographs not merely as clarifying images but as complicating ones. Specifically, I will examine Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City, in which the seemingly loose connection between the narrative and the randomly (at least at first glance) inserted photographs suggest that the author is interested in something beyond the simplistic notion of photographic realism. Rather, I argue, he creates medium within which the text and the image work together, sometimes to enhance and sometimes to challenge the experience of the reader. Istanbul, which can be described as kind of pseudo-memoir and Kunstlerroman, contains black and white photographs of the city scattered throughout the volume along with other visual components (sketches, engravings, and paintings) which provide an in-depth look at what for many Westerners is an unfamiliar urban landscape. (2) The placement of the pictures appears to have little connection with the narrative, which is based on the author's account of his childhood as well as his meditations on the city's past. …

Ethical, Methodological, and Practical Reflections When Using Q Methodology in Research with Young Children

The objective of this discussion is to raise ethical, methodological, and practical issues concerning research with young children and the use of Q methodology through our experiences with a study of young children's feelings when in situations related to parental divorce. Q methodology was applied with 20 visual statements depicting a range of feelings for five-year-old children from Norwegian daycare centers to sort according to a How do you generally feel? condition of instruction. The issues resulting from this work are ethical considerations, methodological reflections, and practical concerns.

Cultural Heritage in the Work of Two Xhosa-speaking Ceramic Artists

CMYK Page 64 09652_20705064 As Xhosa-speaking artists working with clay1 we, Gcinikhaya Dase and Siziwe Sotewu (Fig. 1), are developing a visual narrative style to reflect upon our lived experience and create sequential artworks expressing ideas about aspects of our cultural heritage2 in contemporary South Africa. We focus on a regional aspect of southern African culture to look for and comment upon its intrinsic value, and do not intend an essentialization3 or valorization of Xhosaspeakers’ experiences and dilemmas at the expense of South Africans from differing backgrounds. We are not sitting back feeling satisfied, but have made enquiries into own backgrounds, which indeed are part of a greater social picture, and thereby have become engaged in looking for what Achille Mbembe calls “a transformative relation with our past as a condition sine qua non of our control over our own future” (Holler 2002:2). We were both born in the Eastern Cape and both speak Xhosa, and we also share a hope that by bringing our thoughts and artworks into a public arena—through exhibitions with accompanying text,4 by being available for discussions, and now by writing this article—ordinary people may be encouraged to express their own ideas about identity and aspects of what goes into making individuals who they are. Our focus on aspects of Xhosa-speakers’ cultural heritage by no means constitutes a yearning for lost roots. We are part of contemporary society and cannot turn back the clock, nor are our visual and verbal statements neutral acts. By publicly claiming aspects of South African life and commenting on them, we raise historically disempowered voices and speak (Spivak 1988), thereby becoming part of an ongoing political movement toward social transformation based on equality and exchange of knowledge as one way of redressing past misunderstandings, misrepreCultural Heritage in the Work of Two Xhosa-speaking Ceramic Artists